Le Best of Annecy 2012*

* Best of Wot I Saw

Yesterday I arrived home from another fantastic animation festival at Annecy. This year was particularlly special as Ireland was the spotlight country for the festival. Animation Ireland, The Irish Film Board and SDGI did a great job of promoting and putting together Irish events, retrospectives, exhibitions and of course parties!

On a personal level, this was lovely for me as I've only been back in Dublin working for a year and it finally gave me the opportunity to meet some of the wonderful folks from other studios around town.

Features

I got to see a few screenings and thought I post a couple of best stuff that I saw. Of the features, I saw and enjoyed The Lorax, Le Tableau, Zarafa and (having gone in to the screening, wanting to not like it) Madagascar 3.

The stand out film for me was the Spanish feature 'Wrinkles'

Shorts

I got to 3 out of the 5 shorts in competition screenings and saw and enjoyed this year's worthy winner 'Tram'

Below are a selction of other shorts that I really liked too...

The People Who Never Stop *teaser* from florian piento on Vimeo.

Second Hand from Isaac King on Vimeo.

Extracto de Lagrima from Carlo Vogele on Vimeo.

How to eat your Apple (teaser) from Erick Oh on Vimeo.

and finally the wonderful 'A Different Perpective' by Chris O'Hara

"A Different Perspective" Trailer from Chris O'Hara on Vimeo.

Other Bits n Bobs

There was as always lots of other stuff going on in the festival. With the Ireland focus going on, I nipped along to various Irish networking and special events - the one on Thursday featuring a moving speech from Tomm Moore. The culmination was a great night 'painting the town green' at Finn Kellys on Friday night - it was the party of the festival.

Most of the 'making ofs' were booked out by the time I got meself organised, but I did get along to an impressive presentation by Brown Bag about their new feature project 'Deep'.

I was also helping out on the (2D Animation software) CelAction stand in the MIFA and saw a great case study presentation from Celaction, Adobe and Jamie from Karrot Animation about their heart warming series 'Sarah and Duck'.

I also managaed to fit in one of the TV series in competiton screenings with some great stuff like 'Circus Show', 'Regular Show' and 'Save Your Planet'. This was the first time I had seen the fantastically mnetal, wow-I-can't-believe-they-actaully-made-this 'Secret Mountain Fort Awesome'.

So that's it for Annecy 2012 and that's enough text I reckon - the next post will have drawings in - I promise. Merci Annecy - à la prochaine!