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The Annecy Festival opened its doors today in France, and as usual, the 3DVF team is attending the world’s largest event dedicated to animation.
This year, the Festival starts one day earlier. The goal is to plan a few more screenings for the ever-growing crowd of animation lovers.
The team behind the event also chose to open the Festival with Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams, an animated feature by Benoit Chieux Produced by Sacrebleu Productions. We will discuss further later on this movie reminiscent of Ghibli, The Neverending Story and Moebius. For now, we can sum it up as a mesmerizing and powerful piece of animation, with a beautiful art direction and an amazing soundtrack. A must see.
We also managed to meet various people from the animation industry.
For example, we had a short chat with Mexican animator and director Jorge R. Gutierez (Maya and the Three, The Book of Life) who is the patron of MIFA Campus this year. > And as a reminder, this year, the Annecy Festival is celebrating Mexican animation!
We also met with Claire Lefranc from French collective Les Intervalles. Their goal is, among other things, to make the animation industry more inclusive. Claire Lefranc will also take part in a panel about LGBTQ+ Challenges in Animation Today and Tomorrow later this week.
Later on, we met Franck Petitta, who is heading French animation school école Georges Méliès. The school was just awarded (article in French) some public funding as part of a wider initiative, la Grande Fabrique de l’image (article in French), aimed at developping the French animation, cinema, VFX, videogame industries. Thanks to this funding, Georges Méliès will be able to expand and provide teachings about virtual production, volumetric video, real-time pipelines.
We also caught up with Alexandre Noyer, a pinscreen animation specialist. We interviewed him a couple years ago (article in French only, sorry, but videos are included) about this peculiar (and almost forgotten at some point) animation technique and how he is bringing back to life by building and selling new screens. We also exchanged a few words with Mathieu Muller, Senior Product Manager High End Graphics at Unity. A good opportunity to discuss real time technologies.
We also attended a screening titled Queer Animation: The Bright Colours of Diversity, which attracted many animation lovers. We especially enjoyed Purpleboy by Alexandre Siqueira, a touching and beautiful short.
Last, but not least, don’t forget to follow us on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn: we’ll be publishing articles, interviews, photos during the Festival and afterwards!
