Ottawa International Animation Festival

The Ottawa International Animation Festival is considered one of the biggest animation festivals in the world and the biggest in North America. I attended the festival this weekend and watched many animated films and title sequences selected for the festival. While watching the screenings I kept noticing how many different styles and techniques were being used to create the films; Hand-drawn, oil painted, cut-out, claymation, CG animation, rotoscoping you name it. It was impossible to not admire the amount of dedication and skill to create such great work, specially when I am starting to learn the techniques they are using.

At the festival they also offered various professional development workshops with people like the director of "The Blue Umbrella"- Pixar's latest short, Regular Show's creator JG Quintel, Disney animator Eric Goldberg (Alladin, Hercules, Fantasia 2000, etc...) and a few more. They talked about developing stories, coming up with ideas, animating and working in the industry.

It's difficult to find many of the films screened since most of them can't be available online after being selected for the festival, but here's one very interesting animation and the trailer for the festival, which used a lot of simple but interesting motion graphics.



Shugo Tokumaru "Katachi" from Kijek / Adamski on Vimeo.

Ottawa Animation Festival

Didn't mean for this post to be so late in the week, but a project threw me off. Anyway...

I'm currently in ACP: Animation with Jason Harrington, and in a few weekends he's taking us to the Ottawa International Animation Festival! It lasts from Sept. 21 to 25 and attracts animation companies and films from around the world. The animation submission component of it is incredibly competitive- about 2,000 films get submitted and just over 100 are chosen to be screened. The festival attracts big names, too, like Pixar and Dreamworks. Jason also kept mentioning the seminars where they show you the latest in animation and 3D technology, including technology that they're using in space programs like NASA to get 3D images of things like the Sun (he said that the 3D in-your-face, detailed projection of the Sun they showed them was beyond amazing).

If anyone wants to check out the festival, here's their site. I'll probably post about it after we get back. I'm really really really looking forward to it, and I hope to see some awesome things.