BAF- Day 1

On our first day of BAF I wasn't sure what to expect and the early morning nearly killed me but I actually really enjoyed it! I liked seeing the professional films, seeing what's happening now and the different ways of animation professionals are using. In professional 1- I particularly enjoyed ' in the air is Christopher gray' by Felix Massie. I loved the colours and the simplicity of the 2D animation. I liked how even though it was simple, the characters still had personalities. I also like that this piece can work so well with not much background- I'm not a fan of drawing backgrounds at the moment. It was also funny which is always a bonus. Is comedy something you just know how to do? or can you learn it?

I also liked 'Boles' by Spela Cadez. This is a completely different style using puppets. In this animation, the puppets spoke different language and it was subtitled. In some of the talks I was made aware that if you cant speak English, you usually don't use language. But in this case it worked! It kind of helped to make you feel you were in a different country. The story line was exotic and tangled and at the end I wasn't quite sure what was real. I thought at first that this might have been stop motion but it's not. I'm still trying to get better at figuring out the difference on screen.

Another film we watched was 'Canis' by Marc Riba. In my opinion, this was a horrible story. It made me feel sick. However, it I didn't want to look away. I guess this is the sign of a good storyline or film maker? Even so, I didn't like it and I never want to watch it again. This was stop motion/ puppets. I don't know if this made it scarier because it was a physical being rather than computer generated? I think that's something to think about when creating an animation. It was a silent film, again because of the language barrier. It added to the effect though, it made it scarier.

Next we come to the student films 1- I was amazed at how students could produce such incredible work! in some cases, better than the professionals! I particularly enjoyed 'The kiosk' by Anete Melece. It was quite humorous. I didn't think I liked that style of cut out animation but I really enjoyed this. I think as long as an animation has a good storyline and is done well, it doesn't matter what media is used, that just adds to it.

'Ab Ovo' by Anita Kwiatkowska (what a mouthful)  was so good! This was done using clay to an INCREADIBLY high standard! It was captivating the way it all just spread around making new shapes, making the ladies body change as she got further in her pregnancy. And the inside? how do you do that with clay?! so good! Although it didn't have a story as such, it still had content which was made interesting through animation. Very clever I loved it.

There were a lot of good animations on this one, I actually enjoyed it more than the professional ones.

Next came Lee Hardcastles master class. Now I have never really been into Claymation before but he made it funny. The Yorkshire accent definitely added to the humour. It's rare you hear it in animations. He made everyday things into stories that ended up really gory! It was very cleaver really. I was very interested to hear about how he got to where he is now, through YouTube and what he did while he was studying, that he preferred to work on his own and stumbled across stop motion at film school. Unfortunately we had to leave part way through his talk to catch a train, I would love to have heard more.