Animex, The International Festival of Animation

So, as mentioned in a previous post, me and another few animators headed to Animex at Teeside University in Middlesbrough for a series of interesting and very informative talks. The particularly enjoyable presentations were those by Ed Hooks and David Au, a pretty down to earth guy who we caught up with later in the student union. He offered some pretty useful tips and advice for effectively getting into the industry and gelling with fellow animators.

We were also gifted with free Disney notepads upon entering the lecture theatre, which was a nice little addition:

Dork face on (and slightly hungover)

The "Life of Pi" talks were particularly interesting as Stuart Sumida and Hans Rijpkema (both of whom we'd listened to before) were close friends and co-ordinated their back-to-back talks very effectively. The festival unfortunately fell a couple of days before our inanimate object assessment was due and therefore we had to work on it in the hotel (all work and only a little play)

                           Stuart Sumida, professor at California State University, San Bernadino

   The work behind the effects was positively astounding