NicolaLEverill: May 2013

This post is all about my time at Stuttgart what we had to complete before flying and actually during the 48 hour contest. I personally had a great time and a great birthday, it is a particularly lovely city with a lot of cultural things to see and do, I couldn’t put my camera away.

Before flying over to Germany were where able to create our puppets beforehand! I created Trixi, the jockey’s armature and the Stable box that they were traveling in. To see how I created Trixi, go to my previous post or simply click here.

When arriving at Stuttgart airport, we were greeted by our personal shuttle to the hotel with ITFS logo card being waved at us. We stayed at Inter-hostel which was rather central to all the cities attractions and a shortest walk to the festival venues. The room that we had been HUGE, and the view: Lovely.

Being chosen for the 48 hour animation jam, both me and Lily received guest competition passes. Allowing us to go to all the different screenings we could possibly wanted to go to. And flicking through the festival program, I came across this little beauty. Both our names in the program! In black and white, representing Great Britain. Scary.

Still image from our Stuttgart piece 'Trixi falls in love'

During the contest itself, unfortunately we had to set up in an extremely bright room, with no black out fertilities. Tragedy for a stop motion animator, but fear not we battled through the problem. And we still produced a half descent animation, by simply changing the brightness and contract settings due preproduction. And trying to get all the segments of animation to a similar colour balance, within reason.

Apart for the light problem, the entire experience of being a part of such a competition was brilliant. Everyone involved was exceptionally talented and lovely individuals, even the team helping us were very inviting and helpful in many ways, even ensuring we had enough to eat and drink during the 48 hour. I would definitely encourage any student in any form of animation to try and get involved into this competition, it’s as you say possibly one of a life time thing.

On the second day of the competition, a German film crew came and interviewed each team individually. I and Lily were completely shocked. I’m currently trying to find out if our interviewed did in fact get screened on German TV.