Creativity Works: Content Production WEEK 4

27 November 2020

This week at Creativity Works: Content Production the group have been productive! They have been getting on with editing, learning how to edit the timing, rhythm, and how to best tell a story for the final rough cut of their film.

The Content Production cohort were given an amazing Inspirational Workshop with guest speaker Bart Yates who is an Executive Producer at Blink Ink.

Blink Ink is a world-class London based animation studio creating short-form video content with partners in advertising, music, and broadcast industries.

Bart speaks about his early career up until now, he mentions the importance of always being willing to help out at all times when working in production as you never know what opportunities can come by.

The talk with Bart was relevant as it opened an extra layer of different careers. Particularly, in terms of looking at the back-end element of producing beautiful animation.

During the talk, we get full insight into commercial work, agency work, and the different types of work people can do within animation and most importantly, Bart touches on the fundamental principles of simple and complex animation.

We get a sense of how to keep animation virtual and understand how animators are close to actors. For example, creating actions via drawings' animators, analysing what the character’s motivations are and what the characters are thinking. It was helpful for the participants to get an insight into animation, and the different roles.

Tour of snazzy office space

At the start of the talk, we were given a virtual tour of Bart’s/Blink Ink’s very snazzy office, the group were amazed - especially getting the opportunity of seeing the office in the digital world. The tour made them feel comfortable, gave an idea of the working space and there was so much love in the chat function!

Stages of animation

We looked at the different stages, forms, and examples of where animation can be shown, mainly via music and sound. We were given an understanding of how this can be brought to life.

Bart walked us through a rough animation and how this looks like a month into the project. We were taken through the storyboard process in animation, and Bart mentioned that horizontally framing animation helps to make the format cinematic and cool. We got a real sense of who is involved and how many people are in the animation process step by step…

In addition, we looked at the stop motion animation and the time frame of this within TV and Film and Bart talked about his previous project Fantastic Mr. Fox. According to Bart, this took approximately 2 weeks to make the process happen! Finally, we then look at mixed media and the correlation between live-action, we were shown an incredible example clip from the FIFA World Cup from BBC which was produced in 2018.

Different Voices in animation

We wrapped up with a delightful Q&A and Bart spoke about animation being very ‘middle class’ and a lot of people having the privilege of creating in their bedrooms and luxury of equipment. Bart mentions a key point about the importance of having people from different backgrounds, different voices and that this is very essential in including different stories.

Bart also mentioned the animation industry being very male-dominated and the importance of it being diversified whether it be in age, gender, race, class etc...

Quotes from our workshop:

Bradley said ‘’can’t wait’’ and even offered to be a tea maker!

The chat blew up with reactions! At Content Production we like to use ‘’***‘’ - meaning we resonate with what the speaker is saying.

A lot of our participants were enjoying the talk:

Viola said “Brilliant”

Lara said “This is mad I love it”

Bradley said “Animation is taking over the game”

Next week, we deliver! The cohort will have presented their rough cut to peers for feedback, developed their individual edits, tested out different ways to put the film together, refined and finalised their films.

We have some exciting talks from our fantastic inspirational speakers Cass Kyeyune (an alumnus) on Directing her short film for the ICA + BBC Mother Tongue and additional talks: Casting for short-form content and commercials with Sarah Small where we will be getting gems upon gems from the expert themselves!