Bradford Animation Festival 2009
Bradford College and the WOW Academy have once again been major sponsors of Bradford Animation Festival. Always an important event in the city's calendar, BAF, now in its 11th year, continues to grow in prestige and profile.
From the 10th to 14th November, the National Media Museum hosted an exciting programme of screenings, awards and workshops and talks led by major industry players.
Film Festival Producer and Bradford College alumnus, Ben Eagle, revealed "We had around 1500 people visit over the five days, with over 8000 tickets sold and around 650 delegates. We extended the Festival by a day this year to cater for BAF Game – the successful strand of BAF, so there were definitely more events."
As part of this collaboration, Bradford College were delighted to secure guest speaker, Philip Hunt, Creative Director from Studio AKA, who visited the College to tell students all about the making of his award winning film, Lost and Found. Philip also discussed the amazing commericals he has made and gave a taster of his next animated film project.
If you missed this utterly absorbing talk you can read all about it here.
Throughout the Festival students attended numerous screenings and events.
Bradford College Principal,Michele Sutton OBE, introduced the Festival's opening film by unveiling the work of three talented young animators from the College's National Diploma (Art and Design) Interactive Media course.
Michele praised the College’s ongoing partnerships with the National Media Museum, and Hallmark Creative. “Our most recent project was to invite Jo Marchbank, who is one of our alumni, and her colleague, Tom Gill, from Hallmark to set a competition brief to students to design a Bradford College Christmas e-card. This provided the students with an opportunity to work to a very tight deadline with creatives from a private sector design studio.”
Jo Marchbank, Creative Director of Hallmark, explained "At Hallmark Creative we're always growing new skill sets so that our product offer leads in relevance for today's consumers. This year we launched hallmark.co.uk , an e-commerce channel that will grow and evolve in the coming years. Music, story telling and animation will be central to our content, so having partnerships with colleges is crucial to our talent development process.
This year we collaborated on a Christmas e-card project with Bradford College and the results have been great. The standard was fantastic for such young students – strong storyboarding, some great imagination and software knowledge resulted in some fantastic animations. It was hard to narrow it down to the top three. "
The competition winners were each given high street vouchers, but far more important, each gained the chance to work on placement with the designers at Hallmark and had their work seen by the Festival audience. As well as being shown on the Pictureville cinema screen at the National Media Museum, our winning e-cards will be shown on the BIg Screen in Bradford's Centenary Square from 1st December and throughout the festive season.
You can meet each of our three fantastic winners, discover their inspirations and see their designs here:
Clare Lamkin, Yorkshire Craft Centre and Arts Events Manager for Bradford College, concluded, "Once again the Animation Festival at the Media Museum has been a great success. It has been a pleasure working with Deb Singleton, Director of the Festival, and our students and staff have benefited in many ways.
We have had 360 tickets to various screenings which students from a wide range of courses have enjoyed. The highlight of this year’s festival for me was seeing the National Diploma students have their e-cards screened at Pictureville. The students have produced work of a really high standard and I was very proud of them. I think the recipients of this year’s Christmas e-card will be very impressed by the standard of the animation, as well as enjoying the humour the winning card brings. Tutor Dale Cochrane should be congratulated."