BFI Future Film Festival | Meet the Animation Nominees
The UK’s largest festival for young, emerging filmmakers, the BFI Future Film Festival 2024 returns from 15 – 18 February with a hybrid format that maintains a tradition of live and in-person screenings and events at BFI Southbank alongside a globally accessible online programme, kindly supported by Main Sponsor Netflix. This year’s festival will also include a UK-wide programme in collaboration with BFI Film Academy partners, with screenings and events echoing the spirit of the BFI Future Film Festival providing young people across the country a chance to participate in the UK’s largest festival for budding screen creatives.
This year’s BFI Future Film Festival will include four jam-packed days filled with masterclasses, workshops, screenings, and networking opportunities, with events programmed across three strands: Storytelling, Business of Film and Career Ladder. With a host of industry experts and screen creatives leading the sessions, both online and in-person, the BFI Future Film Festival is the best way for filmmakers aged 16 to 25, across the UK and beyond, to break into the screen industries. The full industry programme will be unveiled on 24 January.
The film programme for the BFI Future Film Festival 2024 will once again be available to view for free worldwide on the BFI YouTube channel and screened at BFI Southbank. Separated into eight strands – Digital, Family, Funny, Identity, Our Planet, Relationships, Society and Towns & Cities – the film programme is a collection of fifty-five shorts by talented filmmakers from across the globe, selected by the Festival team and the BFI Film Academy Young Programmers from more than 1100 submissions.
All of the films screening throughout this year’s BFI Future Film Festival will be in contention for the prestigious BFI Future Film Festival Awards. This week sees the announcement of the nominees, alongside the juries of industry experts who will judge each category. The winners will be revealed on the final day of the Festival.
The nominees in the Best Animation category (supported by BlinkInk and judged by BlinkInk’s Bart Yates) are as follows:
To the Brink (Dir. Hugo Docking)
TO THE BRINK
Dir. Hugo Docking
2023
Programme: SOCIETY
To the Brink is a violent stop motion cabaret for the cynical and depraved which shows how guilt, alcoholic apathy and the apocalypse threaten to push a man to the brink.
For To the Brink, I took influence from Jan Švankmajer, David Firth and Tim Burton. I love Svankmajer’s imaginative use of unorthodox materials, particularly old rusty things. I find the way he gives life to recognisable objects, in such a playful, unusual and unsettling way, so captivating.
I was obsessed with the surreal, dreamlike and darkly funny work of Firth when I was younger. (People tend to nod their heads in an “it all makes sense now” kind of way when I tell them this.)
I’ve also always enjoyed the macabre and cheeky musical numbers in Nightmare and Corpse Bride – I think musical theatre and stop motion animation are wonderful bedfellows.To set the scene, it was 2021. Before the taste of Covid had even left our mouths, Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin was getting reacquainted with his warheads, AI got busy conquering the world and the great wheel of climate change trundled along merrily in the background. Doom, death and destruction was inevitable. The world was ending, we all kind of agreed, it didn’t even really matter how anymore. It felt like all there was left to do was to crack open a beer and play apocalypse bingo.
I wanted to make a film about that feeling. And the duality of emotions that come with it; guilt and apathy. But I also wanted to make it funny, musical and silly. Because what’s the point in getting all sad about it? To the Brink is a stop-motion cabaret that laughs into the void and revels in the futility of it all.To the Brink is a stop-motion animation. We used a plethora of real, tangible materials to create the puppets and then animated them, frame by frame. It was my final MA project at the University of the West of England, self-funded with a tiny budget and made by a small team. We all still work together in Bristol as “Spare Flesh” and have continued to produce twisted and anarchic animations, using a blend of dark comedy, body horror and musical theatre.
-Hugo Docking
Making It Up (Dir. Alice Guymer)
MAKING IT UP
Dir. Alice Guymer
2023
Programme: DIGITAL
Making it Up weaves together themes of consumerism, standards of beauty and social media as we follow the grim lengths one girl will go to in order to be pretty.
My introduction to animation began with the works of Aardman. I was always obsessed with the mixture of the extraordinary and mundane that the classics like Wallace and Gromit captured in their incredible storytelling. As I developed as an artist, the weird and warped works of Vewn constantly kept me in awe with her hilarious comments about our generation through her short films.
My film Making it Up came from my frustration with years of twisted beauty ideals targeting women. Particularly with the dawn of social media, these trends gain a troubling traction throughout their viewers, influencing drastic measures and the normalisation of mass consumption. I really wanted to make something that made people laugh, then double check themselves. So many powerful messages can be carried through comedy and I love creating worlds that feel weirdly familiar through these funny quirks.
Making it Up was created from the 2D frame by frame animation technique. I love using sketchy lines and distorted movements in my films, so 2D digital techniques are really my first loves. I wanted my film to use familiar textures, blending collage and hand-drawn backgrounds to carry home the visceral scenes later in my film. I wanted audiences to laugh and gasp at my work with Making it Up; watching people react to the dark comedy of my film is so exciting as a young film maker!
-Alice Guymer
Bird Drone (Dir. Radheya Jegatheva)
BIRD DRONE
Dir. Radheya Jegatheva
2023
Programme: OUR PLANET
Bird Drone follows a lonely seagull looking for love, who struggles to accept that his newfound object of affection is a human-operated drone with limited battery life.
The works of Pixar and Studio Ghibli absolutely shaped me growing up, and have contributed so much to my love of animated film – I like to think of our short Bird Drone as a love letter to these studios. Aesthetically, there are several nods to Miyazaki’s works and visual style throughout, and also our love of classic wordless Pixar shorts and the visual storytelling involved. I also looked at hybrid animations like Feast, Paperman and Klaus, as well as Alberto Mielgo’s unique style, I loved how there were so many ways to go about the mix of 2D and 3D and was keen on developing the look of this film based on all of these influences. More generally there are so many amazing animators to name, but I’m also a huge fan of Erick Oh, Patrick Osborne, Domee Shi and Robert Valley, and I loved listening to their interviews on the podcast too.
Our writer Clare Toonen came up with the concept of a seagull falling in love with a drone several years back, when she was observing a drone being flown at a Western Australian beach. Years later, our producer Hannah Ngo reached out to me with the film at a very early stage and I fell in love with it and came on board. As someone who grew up watching wordless Pixar shorts, the idea of directing a film about two very different characters with no real dialogue was very appealing, and animation is such a great medium for that.
In directing and animating this film, I wanted to capture the bittersweet feelings of unrequited love – the idea of a seagull falling in love with a drone is cute, but inherently tragic, because we as a human audience know that it can only be one-sided. So it follows a character discovering this – it’s about not committing yourself to someone who will never love you back, letting go of situations and relationships that don’t serve you. It’s about the matters that don’t work out and how they can actually lead to bigger and better things. I also think there’s messaging that will become more relevant as AI grows, especially in terms of real human relationships and connections.
I did often think about what Bird Drone would look like as a live action film, and how difficult it would be to wrangle real seagulls. Part of the ‘challenge’ was to make the viewer feel a connection to a seagull, a bird that many people find loud, vile and/or annoying. Animation allowed us to make our hero seagull more emotive, ‘cuter’, more appealing, while also doing seagull things like stealing chips and staying true to their nature.I was the sole animator of the film, creating it over a couple of years entirely on my Macbook Pro and I mainly used Adobe After Effects, Element 3D, Blender and Photoshop.
Because Bird Drone is about a relationship between the natural (seagull) and the manmade (drone), I wanted to reflect this in a hybrid animation style, and I spent a lot of time trying to create this blend between 2D and 3D. I modeled and rigged the characters in 3D based on our character designer Kate Moon’s illustrations, and then I animated them and imported them into After Effects and Element 3D, incorporating organic painterly textures and a line-boil-like quality. I also digitally painted many elements in Photoshop, put together other sections in blender, and composited everything together in After Effects. I edited the film together in Adobe Premiere. Also a shout-out to Kristof Dedene, his tutorials and brushes about the Studio Ghibli aesthetic were really useful during the creation of the film and he has an amazing YouTube channel!
I’m so ecstatic that Skwigly is interested in including Bird Drone in this feature because it’s like a full circle moment for me, I’ve loved their podcast for years now and I listened to so many of Skwigly’s Animation One-to-Ones and Minisodes while I was making this film!
-Radheya Jegatheva
Appetite (Dir. Peiying Wang)
APPETITE
Dir. Peiying Wang
2023
Programme: RELATIONSHIPS
Appetite explores the link between food and sex, and the conflict between instinct and social discipline, while a man and woman eat together at a restaurant.
Pills! Pills! Pills! (Dir. Kate Saltel)
PILLS! PILLS! PILLS!
Dir. Kate Saltel
2023
Programme: FUNNY
Also nominated for Best Experimental and Best Micro Short
Pills! Pills! Pills! follows shy intern Lobster Lobster, who struggles to keep up during their first day at a pharmaceutical company in this frenetic and fun animation.
For more information and events programme updates visit bfi.org.uk/future-film-festival