Although at first had to be five people that had to go to Lleida Animation Festival only 3 of us could go. Aleix, Raul and I met early in the morning at 8 am, to get to Lleida in plenty of time but we decided to wait for a last-minute companion who could not come because of a traffic jam on the road. Because of that we lost a good time and the journey began at 8:30 am.
After about 2 hours and a half we arrived at the address specified on the Festival website. We lost a little time to find the right place until we finally found the town hall where we asked what the right building was. To our surprise it turned out that the festival was divided into different parts of the city and that theaddress that was given as the main on the web was not the most important headquarters.
Once these small problems were reach we could get to “The Llotja”, a very large building where two conference rooms, a bar where you can chat with various speakers and spaces to make animation workshops. It was in this building where we attended the first act where different companies and animation studios were on a speech about their projects. Unfortunately, due to all the problems suffered, we arrived later than expected at this meeting and we could see only a few presentations.
Once these presentations were over another companies and studios made their speech to present their companies and their core business.
Having had these setbacks due to errors that appeared in the festival’s website we decided to plan the day according to the brochure we were given both in the town hall and in the same venue of the Festival.
At 16h attended a short session of future talent. Most of the projects that we saw in this session were short, dark and with introspective arguments that were really difficult in some cases.
At the end of this session we saw a documentary about the life of a Croatian boy who was wrongly accused by the Romanian police and because of that decided staging a hunger strike. We saw this film at 17:30 and was titled Crulic ATR.
Following this screening we had a little break until the next event. We advantage this brake visiting the room that was on the lower deck where was the bar, with some of the artists who had exhibited his work at the festival, and where you could interact with some techniques for animation as the Stop-Motion.
At 19h we returned to the same room to see 10 short more. This time the Festival gave us a brochure with the name of each short and a scale from 0 to 10 to rate it. Each audience member received a brochure that would serve to give the audience award for best short. All had a very good level of animation despite belonging to different aspects of animation. Some made use of animation techniques in oil, other more conventional 3D animation and other short decided to bet on a different way as animation using only lines or integration in a real live action.
In my case assessments were above 7 in most cases except for one case in which I evaluated some short notes of 3 and 4. Once I put a 9 to a short and a 10 to two other shorts that seemed very well done in every way, both in animation and in the script.
To end the day we were at the last presentation on the animation used as documentary. It was interesting to see that even though animation is not always have to be a short or a movie. The speaker was Andy Glynne who was dedicated to making documentaries about some diseases and documentaries about potential problems faced by immigrant children to travel to another country. The message I try to launch to signify the reason for making the documentary with animation was that being a “cartoon” is not human and therefore usually more long-term move to a possible documentary of a real person. He said that normally people only think on the problem while they are seeing the documentary but if it’s an animation documentary it’s more easy to make them think after they had seen the film.
He also said that some documentaries he had done to help some diseases treatment have had unexpected results. Some patients wrote him to say that thanks to his documentaries they could finally tell to his doctor what they feel when they have the disease.