Forest Conservation Organisations

As part of the animation festival promotion, I have decided to relate everything to deforestation. This way it can be ethically concerned and relate to my original ideas about using the forest narrative.
I noticed that on each of the posters there is a selection of sponsors across the bottom. For example:

I decided that I could put some of my own sponsors in this spot, specifically organisations relating to deforestation and forest conservation. I found these ones that are exclusive to france or work internationally:

UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme)

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation)

IFN (Inventaire Forestier National - "National Forest Inventory")

UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)

REDD+ -

Nelson Boles

These two animations show off Nelson Boles' really impressive simple style of drawing with really advanced understanding of motion through animation, especially with animating speed and sudden movement even on a slow frame rate.





I really like the simple style where everything has only one colour with a darker tone to represent shadow. This kind of style could definitely be an influence for my own animation style in this promotional video.

ITFS Zoopraxiscope

This is a commissioned animation used to promote the International Festival of Animated Film, which is a festival held in Stuttgart, Germany and is pretty similar to the Annecy Festival. In fact, this promotional video is pretty much exactly the kind of outcome that could come from my selected brief. It shows off some really nice skill in animation and shows how things can happen in animation that are otherwise impossible to show in film. This animation was created with a relatively slow frame rate, possibly the Flash default of 12 (although it would have been selected as this frame rate, not just left default). The drawings shows a really impressive understanding of movement over time and of perspective which is constantly changing and morphing at all angles.

The Night of All Fears / Flash B-Movie Trailer

This is a trailer for a horror film created in Flash for a challenge that was to bring new life into an old B-movie or to create a completely original one. It uses some really nicely drawn elements and works pretty much exclusively with tweening. This means that the artwork is stunning, but the flow of the animation looks a bit stiff. This is a substitute that has to be made for high quality artwork, as to animate it would take far too long to be viable. The same can also be said for the opposite, as smoother animations with more realistic style movement will probably require a frame by frame drawn method which will greatly reduce the quality of the artwork elements.



This style of animation works brilliantly for the composition of this animation.

Annecy International Animation Film Festival - Past Posters

Because I will be looking to create some print promotion resolutions I have looked at the past examples of posters for the festival. A different poster has been made for each year that the festival has run, so why break from tradition with my work. I want to create a range of different promotional material, but a good start will be trying to fit a poster into this years theme and to try and link it with my own animation.

These are my favourite posters over the 38 different festivals that have been held. Bearing in mind that these can be up to 50 years old so the style of some of them are a bit dated.

Each of the posters has some kind of reference to modelling or drawing, both of which are essential in animation. My poster will also have to have some kind of reference to animation to make it relevant to the festival itself. 

One interesting thing about each poster is that none of them have a set logo or branding for the film festival itself. This means that it changes every year to suit the poster rather than the other way around.

The website has this logo:

But I can't see it on anything else. 

This means that I can create a logo myself to fit the years theme or to fit the poster design. My favourite of the logos/type in the posters is the one directly above form 2007. The hand drawn look gives a Tim Burton feel to it and represents the idea of hand rendered animation really well. 

Docteur Tom - La Liberte en Cavale

This animation shows a flawless mix of frame by frame animation mixed in with some tweening motion but keeping the same consistent style throughout. It uses a contrast of bold colours to black and white which makes it really eye catching and the relatively short length keeps the narrative concise and interesting throughout.



Style-wise this animation works in a similar way to the ORLEGI video previously posted. The painted detail of the backgrounds remains stationary but adds a lot to the animation in total.

"ORLEGI"

This animation called ORLEGI is about a girl and her friend (Who I think is a bear) that go on a trip down a river and restore the colour green to a forrest. The animation is relatively short, but this is easily made up for in quality and content. The animation shows a lot of different skills ranging from really great characters through deep understanding of animation and to stunning background design. The overall piece flows really well and I think that the fact that it is kept concise keeps it fresh and interesting the whole way.
It shows another style of animation which uses simple shapes and flat colours but with a good amount of stylised detail.



It reminds me a lot of the cartoon "Samurai Jack" to the extent that I assume this animation was inspired by it.

"Bendito Machine III" - Zumbakamera

This animation is the third in a series called "Bendito Machine" which are abstract tribal based flash animations from an animation and illustration based design company in Barcelona and Mallorca called 'Zumbakamera'. This shows a really different style of animation compared to those shown on this blog so far. It still uses primarily the tweening of vectorised drawings which will have been created using a line tool or the pen tool in a similar way to Adobe Illustrator. The narrative is told without any words which is interesting considering how abstract the animation actually is, showing a lot of skill in communicating through image alone. The plot is a bit vague, but the general idea can be understood relatively easily.



I think that this style works really well in the context of this specific story but I can't imagine being interested in using a similar style for my animation.

5 Second Project - Ross Phillips

This is a really clean and well thought out conceptual Flash animation by Ross Phillips. As the name suggests, it is only 5 seconds long, but it manages to get the point across really well even in such a concise time frame. This will have been done almost solely with tweens and vector shapes rather than the frame by frame style.



The best thing about the animation is how smooth the whole thing is even though the frame rate seems to be pretty standard. Considering frame rate will be important when I start to animate, as a high frame rate means a much smoother animation but also means that I will need to draw more frames.

"Lion in a Coma" - Ori Toor

This animation is a perfect example of some of the things that can be created using a frame by frame animation technique in Flash. This means that each of the individual frames would have been drawn one after the other and then played in quick succession to give the illusion of movement. Flash is really good for this kind of animation because it has a lot of tools to help such as the "onion skin" view. What this means is that once the frame is duplicated and then cleared, a faint kind of ghost of the last frame is visible so that you know where roughly to draw when changing each frame.
I used to work pretty much solely with frame by frame animation but it has been a long time since then and I will have to reacquaint myself with it. It is much more complex than using tweens but gives much more flexibility when used properly as this video shows.
The video will also have used 'movie clips' which are like small looping movies within the overall movie, which will have been used in any of the instances where a shape repeats a certain set of movements or a while.



This is a really cool style for animation and definitely makes sense within the theme of 'imagination' as nothing in it directly references anything real in a reality based way. I'm not sure if this style would really be suitable for what I have in mind when animating, though it is definitely worth considering.

MIFA

MIFA stands for the International Film Market which is a meeting point for professionals in all fields of animation to discuss working together and helping get new projects of the ground. MIFA occurs right nearby to the International Animation Film Festival as the two are linked and support each other though MIFA happens a little later between the 8th and 10th of June.

"POP"

This is the winner for last years competition brief which is the same brief that I have based mine on. The brief was to create an animation no longer than 5 minutes which showed off the animators creativity and included the title "Annecy International Animation Film Festival". This animation is only 2:30 in length and shows off some really nice animation style. It is called 'POP' and is by an animator name "Squetch". This is a really good example of a slightly different style of animation, as it seems to use the vectorised line features of Adobe Flash rather than the paint brush tool which is more popular for a frame by frame style. This animation includes much more tweening than frame by frame drawing which gives it a really perfectly smooth appearance.



Another thing that has struck me about the animation is the narrative. It shows off the animation style and is a very unique story meaning that actually it would fit with my brief as well. it hadn't really occurred to me that the animation could take on the form of a story, as originally I have planned to just show off as many imaginary things as possible. This could be something that I really have to reconsider when designing and storyboarding.

"Yellow Cake" - Nick Cross

This flash based animation tell a tragic tale about a smaller race of animals that rebel against their oppressors and eventually end up getting wiped out. It includes a lot of darker imagery and situations in a cartoony, playful way, touching on real life similarities and references. I love the style of this animation as it looks a bit like an older Tom & Jerry cartoon in style and animation, with really detailed backgrounds. The content of the animation is a bit dark for what I need mine to represent but the style is a nice possibility for inspiration.

Annecy Film Festival 2011

The 2011 film festival is set to be held between June 6th - 11th. The judging will be done by 12 selected judges and i think that the festival is set to have the most screenings set to show to date. The exact figures are:

150,000 tickets
7,300 accredited
630 films screened
224 films in official selection

This years official poster looks like this:

As part of the range for this half of the module I will look at creating posters and other promotional material to go along with the main promotional animation, so looking at the styles of previous posters is important. In fact the Annecy website has an entire gallery of every poster they have ever made for the Festival. 

Annecy Film Festival

the  Festival International du Film d'Animation d'Annecy (Annecy international Animation Film Festival) is an event held every year in the rural French town of Annecy.
The Festival is now a large scale event that encompasses all kinds of animation and pays respect to the most influential and creative animated films through a series of categories: Short Films, Feature Length Films, Films for Television/ Advertising, Student Films and Films made for the Internet.
When the festival first launched in 1960 it was an event that was held every two years, though since 1998 it has become an annual occurrence.

Short History

As I said the festival started in 1960, making last year its 50th Anniversary. The festival was actually born in 1956 when Pierre Barbin and the Annecy film club met and proposed a section for animated films to be places in the Cannes Film Festival. This idea didn't really suit the Cannes Film Festival, so instead a separate event was created to be held in Annecy to appreciate and award animations and their creators.
In 1960 the first ever film festival was held from June 7th to June 12th and the resounding success allowed the event to continue to happen and to grow to the huge event that it is today.

This is the poster that was used for the first ever Annecy Film Festival in 1960.
In comparison, this is the poster for last years 50th anniversary of the festival.