Bringing the talent to Soho….the VFX and Animation Showcase

The Skillset VFX and Animation Showcase on the 14^th July attracted over 300 quests, many from the UK’s animation and VFX companies, to view talent from Skillset’s seven great accredited courses, and a number of guest courses from our media academies.

It’s part of Skillset’s proactive stance to support and promote those courses that show they have the kind of curriculum and expertise to engage with industry and endeavour to supply the new entrants it needs.

Falmouth students prepare for the masses

This is the second year running we’ve held the event in Soho, in the subterranean lair of the Vinyl Factory. Last year’s feedback from our Animation industry council told us we needed to make it easier for our guests to see a more focused selection of work, so this year we also collected work online- so our industry friends could view work before they arrived (and be reminded of who was who the morning after!). You can see samples of the graduates work here, and here.

For the students there was an extra surprise- a series of seminars in the afternoon before the graduate fair. The idea was to help them on the way into the wide world of animation with some invaluable advice.

First up was Greg Boardman from Three Stones Media Ltd who told how he had managed to bring the children’s tv break-out phenomena of Rastamouse to the screen. Greg talked about the hard work behind the scenes, and how to pitch and persuade successfully.

There were also talks about the kinds of technology that animators use. Andy Blazdell, CEO of CelAction shared a case study of how CelAction was used at Astley Baker Davies on Peppa Pig, and Autodesk’s Application Specialist Graham Bell explained how the focus in modern animation has moved away from single pieces of all-singing, all-dancing software towards an emphasis on pipelines and cross-media workflow. Finally our old friend and consummate showman Michael O’Neill from Adobe showed how you can build layered and complex animated composites in Premiere Pro, starting with a storyboard, build an animatic, engage with creation of 2D characters in Illustrator, Photoshop & Flash, use rigging, inverse kinematics, lip syncing, masking, and also looked at final delivery of animation for film, television, iPhone, iPad & Android devices.

Skillset CEO Dinah Caine congratulates our accredited animation students

It wasn’t all technology. Christian DeVita, story artist from Fantastic Mister Fox and Tim Burton’s new Frankenweenie (in production) showed some unique footage of off-beat director Wes Anderson visualising his unique take on Roald Dahl’s classic. Christian talked about his experiences, the importance of good pre-visualisation and the skills needed to translate a good story to screen, accompanying his presentation with clips, storyboards and animatics.

Since most graduates tend to think only of animating as a career we held a session called Meet the Producers. Animation needs producers- there’s a shortage; but how do you become one? Is it something you can study, or is it all about the school of hard knocks? Marion Edwards, VP of programming at HIT Entertainment was in conversation with VFX Producer Louise Hussey from Rushes, BBC producer Steve Cannon from CBeebies, and Development Producer Lucy Murphy (Mr Benn to The Gruffalo!) for a very illuminating session.

Ravensbourne seem used to posing....

Innovation and novelty drive the animation business so Nag Vladmersky, director of the London International Animation Festival (August 26th to September 4th at the Barbican, Horse Hospital and the Rio Cinema) showed a few of the best animations from the last 12 months, and interviewed Chris Shepherd, former Director at Slinky Pictures, about mixing art practice with commercial imperatives. How do you keep your ideas fresh under commercial pressure? Can you have your own experimental practice and still be commercially successful?

The Vinyl Factory starts to fill up

For our final session we thought it would be great to make students aware they have the potential to start their own business- and that’s exactly what some ex-Bournemouth students did over eleven years ago. In a Blue Zoo retrospective one of the founders Oli Hyatt explained how they did it, and how they grew into one of the most exciting multi BAFTA award winning animation companies around.

The presentations were over, and the evening graduate fair lay ahead. However, the Showcase is all about getting students and industry connected, so we were really pleased to offer the Skillset Speedmatching service. Imagine speed-dating but instead of laying your cards on the table you lay your portfolio and you’ve got it. Each accredited animation course nominated four students and they had 4 minute bursts to meet and converse about their careers, to quiz industry about how to make themselves more employable, and get one-to-one feedback on their projects and portfolio from some great animation and vfx talent in the room. We’re grateful to the following who gave advice to our accredited graduates; Ian Murphy (Compositing Coach), Ian McCue (Seed), Alwyn Hunt (CG Coach, DNeg), Rebecca Barbour (Nexus), Marion Edwards (HIT), Andy Nicholas (The Mill), Michael Borhi (Framestore), Mick Foley (Sumo Dojo), Mat Rees (Aardman), Gavin Graham (Double Negative), Inga Johnson (Picasso), Louise Hussey (Rushes), Andy Hargreaves (Rushes), Mark Williams (Plum Animation) Dan Simmons (Skillset), Saint John Walker (Skillset), Kevin Spruce (Framestore), and others. Thanks!

Four minute nuggets of advice at our Speedmatch

Then the graduate fair kicked off in earnest, fuelled by a plentiful bar supplied by Adobe. If you were there, we’d like to hear what you thought- early reports say students found work even in these challenging times. We hope we managed to connect industry and new talent, and we hope the tutors and technicians- often the unsung heroes behind student success, feel inspired and re-invigorated. But for now, we all need a little lie down…..