Volunteering - Bristol Encounters Film Festival

During the summer I applied for multiple volunteering positions at festivals and was able to get a placement as a volunteer at the Encounters Film Festival in Bristol. The festival lasted for 5 days and during that time I was able to meet a lot of young, independent directors from the National Film and Television School. I was able to see what master courses people were doing and get an insight into what i could expect from a masters as well as seeing the quality of work coming from NFTS students. It also gave me a fair few new connections to keep in touch with. I was able to get to know a large majority of the other volunteers who were not all animation or film related and so provided new perspectives.

I did not go to see many of the screenings, however I did see two talks - one by Michael Dudok de wit (the creator of Red Turtle) and Pierre Coffin (creator of The Minions). The Minions talk gave me an insight into the path an animator who has graduated from Goeblins can take. The Michael Dudok de wit talk was all about the production of The Red Turtle and he went into explicit detail over what the role of the director is, how to listen to your team and the difference between a director and a leader. a director is someone who listens to the team whereas a leader is someone who doesn't. He also went into a lot of detail about pre-production and the development of the film, the shorts and the role of symbolism and visual metaphors within his films.

Overall going away to Bristol and seeing something new and different was refreshing.