Whilst on our trip to Bradford Animation Festival, we had
the chance to view many animated shorts. In particular, I really liked the stop
motion animations which included, ‘Moving On’, ‘Life Begins at Breakfast’ and ‘The
Bigger Picture’.
I was really impressed by the animation for the music video
of, ‘Moving On’. I think that the use of string to create the characters and scenery
was unique and very interesting to watch. Additionally, I think that it was
interesting to use this technique to display the sensitive topic of somebody
dying and ‘moving on’ since it allows the audience to connect with the
characters as well as making it easy to watch.
I also liked ‘Life Begins at Breakfast’ because of its
unique style. By using fabrics to create the characters, they appear lovable
and adorable. Although this was only a very short advertisement, it is one that
I found memorable because of the characters.
I thought that ‘The Bigger Picture’ used a very clever
technique, and this animated short in fact won an award at the festival. The
fact that this animation was partly painted and partly modelled seemed very
impressive and again, covered a sensitive topic in an interesting way.
Something that particularly stood out for me with this animation was the
transitions between each scene. For example, one of the characters was pouring hot
water into a mug and then the water from this scene merged into water in a
shower. This was very well thought-out.
Another stop motion animation that won an award at this
festival was the music video, ‘Robin’. Although I didn’t think much of the
song, I really liked the animation in this video and its use of natural
materials such as leaves and flowers to create a beautiful animation.
As well as this, another form of stop motion animation that
I liked in this festival was the use of cut out animation in the animations, ‘Tiger
is Gun’ and ‘Katachi’.
Even though I didn’t particularly like the narrative in ‘Tiger
is Gun’, I did think that the cut out animation style was enjoyable and the
transitions were clever. An example of this is where some paper representing
grass was used in one scene and then, following the camera panning upwards, the
same paper was used in another.
I thought that the stop motion music video ‘Katachi’ was
also impressive because of the style being a cut out animation. I particularly
liked this animation due to the fact that paper used to create it was all laid
out together and never taken away so that it looked like one continuous shot.
My favourite animated short at the festival however, was ‘The
Bear and The Hare’ which was a mixture of 2D animation, stop motion and 3D
modelling. I thought that the design, music and the narrative of this animation
together were very moving and the animation as a whole was very beautiful to
look at. Additionally, I think that the link to Christmas meant that this was
more appealing to a wider target audience as most people celebrate this time of
year.
