Freelance Unbound

One of the things I do when I’m not pretending to be a journalist is animation. I love stop-frame particularly (that’s Wallace & Gromit-style puppetry) and I managed to spend a very happy three months last summer on the Bristol Animation Course on a kind of sabbatical from work.
I didn’t manage to blog about this, of course. Which is a shame, as it was really fascinating and very rewarding. I also spent time with a whole group of people I had a lot in common with from all around Europe. Luckily my friend Jessica did blog about it, so you can get some idea of the flavour from her. And as she’s German, I won’t even comment on her spelling…
But next weekend it’s Animated Exeter – a regular animation festival in the South West. I went last year for the whole week, which was great fun, and I saw a load of great animation (and also some rubbish – always the way). Anyway, this time I’m doing the smart thing which is volunteering to help out, which means I get to meet even more cool people and see films for free, which is even better.
Animated Exeter also holds workshops on things like puppet-making, scriptwriting and life drawing. So part of the reason I’m interested in helping out is seeing how the workshops are put together and looking into whether I might be able to run one in future. Having spent some time recently running journalism training workshops and taking to students in Farnham, I’ve discovered that it’s more interesting than subbing shifts – with the benefit that, though not recession-proof, it can help keep the money coming in during difficult times.
So – naked opportunism and claymation. The perfect combination…