I’ve loved animation since I was a child, and I was so attached to the TV series I watched and their characters that I remember once being devastated when one of my favourite ones came to an end. It was because of them that I started drawing, copying my favourite characters from the screen and trying to remember their features, inventing new adventures about them and making crossovers between the series.

I like all kinds of animation, but I tend to prefer traditional 2D styles. This may be because I regard highly the difficulty of imagining how things would be seen from one perspective or another and trying to represent that on the flat surface of the paper. I don’t minimize at all the 3D technique, but being a simulated camera the one that gives you the effect of perspective when shooting a created object makes me look at it more as a design work rather than as an effort of visualization.

I insist, though, that I like 3D animation very much. I just remember seeing one 3D TV series as a kid, (“Reboot”), which I really loved, but nowadays there are so many 3D films for children that they will soon be more used to this kind of animation than to the traditional one. CGI series and films like Pixar’s and DreamWorks Animation’s are invading both the small and the big screens, and videogames are also contributing to improve hyper realistic animation techniques that are afterwards introduced into filmmaking.

At the Bradford Animation Festival I enjoyed watching excellent 3D productions such as the German “Descendants”, by Heiko van der Scherm, “The curse of Skull Rock”, which I mentioned a few posts before, “Loop”, by Julien Rancoeur and Vincent Baertsoen, “Clik Clak”, by Aurélie Fréchinos, Victor-Emmanuel Moulin and Thomas Wagner, which I already had had the pleasure to see on television, etc.

I’d really like to attempt to make 3D animation but while I’m still learning the basis of 3D software I can just take note of all the factors that I’ll have to consider some day, such as textures, lightning, cameras, skeletons, joints, facial expression, etc.

Although stop-motion is not the animation technique I would like most to use, I’m quite fond of it and I admire the special patience and ability needed to gradually move the elements and characters paying careful attention to every single detail not to ruin a frame. This is another technique I’d like to use someday, but for now I’m going to give it the third position in my list of musts.

Now I feel more like trying traditional animation, enhancing it with a bit of digital effects and ideally I would like to create 3D environments to add some realism.

After having been to my first animation festival I must admit I feel quite overwhelmed by the level of most productions but, at the same time, they have motivated me to work hard on my own animations hoping to produce something I like as much as those productions. I have also realised that I am too influenced by a specific animation style or language and that I must keep on looking other people’s work to change that and to inspire me. I hope that all this visual stimuli received during the festival leaves a trace, at least subconsciously, in my audiovisual language.

It’s also been a positive experience to catch a glimpse of the heritage of some animation techniques, thanks to the retrospectives about several artists, from the traditional animations of John Coates, producer of The Beatles series and “The Yellow Submarine” film, to Barry Purves’ world of stop motion and Daniel Greaves’ blends of cut out, stop-frame and 2D.

To sum up, I really enjoyed going to the Bradford Animation Festival and I'm considering going to the Animac Animation Festival 2009 in Lleida, which takes place from 23rd February to 1st of March.