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HLabs visits the 2024 London In Motion Festival on cutting-edge creativity, motion & design
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Wow, where do I even begin? Looking back at two incredible days, bursting with inspiration and creativity at every turn. The 2024 London In Motion Festival at the Barbican celebrated trailblazing talent in motion design and animation. The event took me on a journey, featuring groundbreaking works, emerging trends, innovative artistry, and cutting-edge technologies. From live demos at the Procreate Lounge to meet & greets in the Industry Garden, here's a recap of my unforgettable experience at In Motion.
On the first day of the festival, we were introduced to several masters in the industry who went through their creative process, going from idea generation & inspiration to the final product with all the ups and downs in between! Here are some standout speakers.
Hayden Jones
Award-winning Visual Effects Supervisor, Hayden Jones showcased a Netflix animated feature Ultraman: Rising, talking us through character design, test shoots and the HUGE amount of research involved in the making of the film. As most of this film is set in Japan, I found the extensive research on the location mesmerising and never realised how much animators respect and pay homage to the original films, images, comics and mangas.
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Hayden Jones showing original artworks and test frames for Ultraman: Rising
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Jones specifies how important it is to always reference back to original artworks and even have a cultural committee solely advising him on how to portray Japan. I really admired the honesty about how scenes were built, for example, lifting elements directly from the Photoshop files into the scenes themselves to “Lose as little digital waste as possible” which is so important in productions as huge as this.
Joseph Mann
I was in awe of Joseph Mann’s journey as an award-winning director highly involved in stop-motion and unmatched character-led storytelling. Mann talked us through some of his brilliant projects that he’s directed and worked on with everything linking back to his drive to always make things by hand.
“People tend to shy away from work-in-progress shots, they are vital.”
Oddly enough, the projects that stood out to me the most were ones related to dairy products. I think it’s the way he transforms an ordinary/familiar product like butter or milk into something magical and ridiculous. The Cravendale advert following the story of Barry the Biscuit Boy in particular, it’s just so joyous and whimsical. Definitely give it a watch if you haven’t seen it already!
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To end the day in the most over-the-top way, we had a HILARIOUS presentation by the wonderful Becky & Joe, masterminds behind the viral YouTube series ‘Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’. They discussed the ins and outs of their struggles as growing artists, from their existential crisis to their studio flooding. I actually have nothing written down from this talk as I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, other than them talking about how making a TV show is like “being beaten to death by your own idea”.
Procreate Lounge
To kick off day 2 I decided to venture into the land of Procreate Lounge, more specifically their newest animation tool Procreate Dreams. Throughout the festival they had illustrations and animators sketching away with live demos of the tool, I gave Dreams a go and created my first-ever stop-motion animation! Really excited to experiment with this tool more!
Nina Gantz
My favourite artist from the entire event was Nina Gantz. Gantz took us on a journey of her 2023 short film Wander to Wonder, with a ton of emphasis on the process. A beautiful short about puppets navigating a big world. It was a project where I could truly picture how much dedication, time and love was put into this film with it, taking an immense 8 years! To put into perspective, a whole 5 months was spent figuring out how to print minute eyelids on these tiny puppets…
“I like the making of, rather than the final film”
To sum up
In Motion London was awe-inspiring and it was a treat to be surrounded by so many creative individuals. One big takeaway of mine is that we should always embrace our weird side and that every serious act or idea deserves a stupid one.
I am desperately looking forward to what In Motion holds for 2025!
Other incredible speakers:
Man vs Machine, MEGAFORCE, Margherita Premuroso, Gustav Hoegen, Fortiche, Alex Hirsch
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How to customize formatting for each rich text
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