The Festival also offered us the opportunity to meet several artists and other people related to the animation industry, who would go to talk about their experiences and to introduce their works screening.
One of them was Daniel Greaves, Animation Director at Tandem Films, who introduced a retrospective of his work on the Festival’s opening day.

His first projected short, “Manipulation”, created in 1991, is great. Oscar winner for Best Animated Short in 1992, this video shows the recurrent relationship between creation and creator, the former trying to escape from the latter’s control. 2D, cut out and stop-frame are perfectly married to show many original interactions between the characters, playing with all available resources: gravity makes the character fall down when the artist turns down the paper sheet and the floor becomes the ceiling; the outlined boy tries to escape through a cut he’s made on the page, but the artists tears it out and finds him; the creator naughtily pushes his creation, squashes it, deforms it, rips it off the paper, blurs its face… This animation-animator relationship resource was already used in 1919 by Max Fleischer in his series "Koko the Clown", which probably influenced Daniel Greaves.
The drawing style is simple, cartoon-like, black and white almost all the time, except at the beginning, when the character tries to fill itself with colour, and at the end, when he comes out of the page. 



“Flatworld”, 1997, is a longer film (30 minutes) made with the same techniques. It’s about the life of Matt Phlatt, his cat Geoff and his fish, Chips, in a rainy flat city. Matt’s routine is disturbed by an accident at work in which he cuts a television wire and receives an electrical shock, magically releasing a thief from a black and white film who carries on his activities in the real world.

I liked the general look of the film, the combination of the techniques and the originality of this invented cardboard-made flat city, convincingly recreated and full of nice details: policemen shoot staples, men shave with a rubber and characters can be crumpled and then recover their appearance.
The travels through the puddles between the flat world and the 2D colourful world that changes from a TV programme setting to another are another interesting aspect of the film.
The characters movements are smooth and very well blended with the backgrounds, which are scale models.

“Rockin’ & Rollin’” is a shorter stop frame production inspired by a musical composition with the same name by W.L. Horning. It shows what could take place inside a pool table. The balls are quite expressive despite not having faces and the interaction between them is just based on tapping and rolling and making some noises.

I also liked “Little things”, in which seven funny situations are presented briefly, without dialogue and using 2D and Computer Graphics, with a similar style to “Flatworld”.

Other short films were screened, like “Beginning, Middle & End”, “Rabbit Rabbit” and many advertisements. Some of them used stop motion and 3D, like the one about Cocopops cereals. Others were 2D based, like the ones for Expedia; some had been made with stop motion, like the Marmite ads starring the famous Paddington bear created by Michael Bond, or the Anchor Butter spots, and there was also live-action combined with CG, in the series of adverts for Ribena’s fruit juices, or with 2D animation, as in the Schweppes ones.