This week I took 23 students to the Bristol Encounters short film festival. It started the usual way...

 

...and as always Bristol is a great venue. We were overlooking the harbour, into which no-one fell...phew.

 The first night ended with another trip to Bombay Boulevard, which is how I finished the festival last year. We left at about 1.00 am. Great start.

 The next three days saw many highlights, most of which were experienced while enduring truley awful seating, but never mind.

The standard of animation seemed even higher than last year and everyone had their favorites.

The major highlights all came on Thursday. I met John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, and was lucky enough to get a caricature by him. This is to be framed and put in pride of place at home.

 John is an animation legend and has been corrupting people with his 'crap' for too many years to mention. A true, uncompromising, and utterly undiluted, artist.

 Close on the heels of John K. I was listening to Amanda Darby from Aardman Animation talking about 3D printing and rapid prototyped heads used for the new Aardman film; Pirates. Fascinating stuff and incredibly informative.

 We got to handle tons of replacement heads...

 And ones of the pirates himself. This had to be one of the best puppets I have ever held, and that is saying something.

Another great festival comes to a close. Same time next year.

I took one of my Steam Punk Engine designs and tried to age it a bit. It only takes a few seconds to find aged paper backgrounds for Photoshop online. Add some free grid lines, play with the opacity and add a bit of noise. The grid was knocked back with an eraser at 50% opacity. Not bad for a quick test.