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Bradford Animation Festival '05 Described as "The UK's biggest celebration of animation", the annual BAF kicks off on Wednesday at Bradford's NMPFT. Now eleven years old the festival has grown tremendously in both scope and size, to the point that last year's Bradford Animation Award saw a whopping 1065 film submissions from 52 countries.
This year's new strand is Animation and Gaming and one of the highlights takes place on the festival's opening day. At the Art Production in the Games Industry event, lead artist of BAFTA nominated Relentless Games, Greg Sue, explains how he designs characters and locations for computer games.
On Thursday, the Animation Behind the Curtain event draws together Clare Kitson and some rare Soviet film. Repeatedly polled as the best animation of all time, BAF will screen Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979, Russia) while Kitson discusses her 2002 book Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator's Journey.
Friday is the highlight of the festival, with appearances from both Aardman Animation's founder and Creative Director Peter Lord, and Phil Dale, the lead animator on Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. In the afternoon Dale describes life behind the scenes working on a feature length stop motion animation and some of the film's puppets will also be on exhibition. The evening is reserved for a screentalk with Peter Lord, along with screenings of both Chicken Run and the stupendous Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Finally, to find out more about visual effects animation, clear your animation-blurred head to meet Graham Jack, the Technical Director of the London visual effects house Double Negative. Jack will be talking about Batman Begins, and Double Negative's creation of the Gotham City skyline. Batman Begins will be shown on the huge IMAX scren, with free entry for all BAF delegates.
All of this general loveliness is in addition to workshops on Machinima, motion capture, and scriptwriting and a chance to see the final shortlist of the BBC Three New Animators Award. Phew. The combination of significant industry figures, relevant screenings and innovative new strands means the BAF 05 is destined to outshine all previous incarnations and further reinforce its position as the UK's most vital animation event.
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