Bradford Animation Festival

This was my first time to attend a animation festival which was not a Chinese animation festival, and I realized that it’s really unlike Chinese. Chinese animation festivals look like exhibition, there will some animation models and game models and some people dress as characters from animations or games. More of people who attend are interested and visitors, there are a few designer want to learn from those animation festivals. However, there are almost lectures in Bradford Animation Festival. It is a bit boring for me because my English is not very well and I can’t understand the details what they say, but I also learn some things.

I had to say I was especially impressed with a animation which i didn't remember its name.It talked about a relationship between a women and her son.I am barely tearing up because watching animations or any movie, however, i was tearing up and the audience who teared up was not just me, it was most of audiences. I realized the importance of strong feeling in an animation after calm down. Chinese animation lacks of strong feeling and most of them is just imitation, so there is hardly a successful animation in China, nevertheless, the animations from America and Europe is famous on their story lines. I think i can focus on imagining my story lines in the future.

A good story is a good story, no matter the medium. When you move to a visual and auditory medium such as animation, you have a much wider field to play with, allowing you to show things you could only normally describe without limiting yourself because of character point of view or other boundaries of the medium. Too, there are drawbacks, such as lacking much room for inner monologue in an animated scene, and the need tho show visually a character's thought process without narrating all of it.

We shouldn't need to be told how someone feels in a visual/auditory storytelling medium.We know someone is in pain by how they clutch the affected area, and their agonized cry; we even know the intensity of the pain by how loud the cry is, and how extreme their reaction. An agonized scream tells us to be worried, while an "ouch!" tells us something is a minor inconvenience. A flinch says papercut; collapsing to the knees says mortal wound. You don't even have to show the wound; it's all about the character actions and using them appropriately to convey emotion. A character can say "I love you" with a look without needing to say the words out loud. Though in animations, you also have the advantage of cartoon effects - fluttering hearts in the background, throbbing hearts bulging from the eyes or chest, etc. Motion, too, has its place; instead of saying "I'm dizzy" a character can reel back and forth with a slack, cross-eyed expression. Take every chance you can to show us how characters feel, whether through normal or extreme portrayals, rather than telling us.

One advantage you don't have in verbal storytelling is the use of color palettes to set the tone. Using color in deliberate ways can go a long way to convey the mood; a washed-out palette can convey a drab, gloomy scene, while dark, stark contrasts tell us we're in a hard-hitting noir setting or a horror. Pastels convey a lighter tone, while consistent use of warm tones can tell us we're in a romance. Think about how color affects your mood and what colors you associate with particular emotions, and choose the color palettes and contrasts for your scenes and settings appropriately. Understand, too, how lighting can affect the mood and the setting, whether soft or dramatic. A scene painted with soft gold or red-gold overtones of light can tell us it's sunrise or sunset; blues tell us it's night; deep shadows with the occasional stark edge of a shape can tell us it's night, or in the middle of a thunderstorm, or just...well, really creepy.