This May the ASE partnered with Flying Bark Productions to host an animation masterclass for Bus Stop Films students. Roughly 30 students were in attendance via Zoom. The class was run by director Noel Cleary and Editor Adam Rainford, with support from Flying Bark HR manager Rachel Neville.
Noel and Adam met 25 years ago while working in hand drawn animation at Disney. Notably they teamed up for 'Maya The Bee 2' and 'Maya The Bee 3: The Golden Orb', and were able to draw on their long history of collaboration.
Their talk touched on the importance of story, animation timing and the relationship between the Editor and director. Running the students through each stage of the film process. They played a series of clips from 'Maya The Bee' to demonstrate the differences between storyboard, layout and animation stages. They discussed how difficult it can be to establish tone and characters arcs in the early phases of the edit. Yet this is most crucial, in order to develop the entire film quickly so that scenes can be viewed in relation to each other and the overall narrative developed.
The students were engaged, and overwhelmingly excited to gain a behind the scenes understanding from professionals. We also got to see previews of the students’ own work.
A takeaway piece of advice Noel and Adam gave to aspiring animators was do the planning.
From the President: Huge thanks to the ASE’s Lily Davis for her incredible management of this event behind the scenes. It was a raging success.