A group of our students selected from all three years of the BA Programme visited the company Litmos Heroes in Warrington las week. There were a number of reasons for the visit firstly to see the company, also for the group to undertake a workshop and lastly to hear about the opportunity for a fully paid year long work placement opportunity at Litmos Heroes.

Edge Hill animation students visiting the studio of Litmos Heroes

A number of our past graduates now currently work at Litmos Heroes

Litmos Heroes is a company that provides the best off-the-shelf courses and content for a whole range of training courses including in leadership, health and safety and safe work practices. A lot of the training videos and content is developed by way of animation as well as by way of infographics, posters, workbooks, etc.

Litmos Heroes website

With just a GoPro camera, a coat hanger, and some string the first year animation students tried out the centriphone technique. Which involves attaching a GoPro camera to a coathanger that has string attached to it and then swinging the GoPro camera above your head which becomes a cross between a lasso and a boomerang.

The GoPro camera can record at 120 frames per second which allows it to capture people and objects whilst moving at high speed. The effect is a way of creating a 360 degrees bullet time effect such as they achieved in The Matrix with lots of cameras.

Edge Hill animation students trying out the centriphone technique

Last week saw the first and second year Animation students going on the annual trip to Wales staying in Llandudno with a day out trip to Betws y Coed where the students got into drawing and capturing audio. The idea of having the trip at the beginning of the year is for it to be partly a social ice-breaker for the students to get to know each other including for the 1st years to meet and get to know the 2nd years.

It wasn’t just the students who were looking to be sociable but also a friendly young seal who managed to bounce their way using their stomach up the beach. The students looked after the seal whilst the RSPCA came to its rescue, carefully transferring the seal back into the sea. Maybe the seal was wanting to get into animation after hearing about the Animation Course at Edge Hill University.

The seal first appears on the beach at Llandudno
The seal then manages to get itself up off the beach and onto the walkway that runs alongside the beach where its looked after by 1st year Edge Hill animation students
The friendly seal takes a breather relaxing on the beach
The seal relaxing on the beach sealed and delivered

Anyone for a joke that has a seal of approval
Q: Why do seals swim in salt water?
A: Because pepper water would make them sneeze

This week we had 11 students come onto our annual Summer School Animation Residential which lasted three days. The students were given the task of producing in groups of around five a stop-motion animation with the aim to achieve a completed animated film to be screened by the end of the residential.

See below for images of some of the great production work undertaken by the students.

From working on the initial props and characters


To working on the final productions

Animation students from Edge Hill University gained invaluable collaborative project experience after linking up with counterparts in Lisbon, Portugal.

Six Animation students from our BA (Hons) Animation Degree went to Lisbon and worked on a joint-animation project with 12 students from Universidade Lusófona, with their work then being showcased during the Society of Animation Studies (SAS) annual conference.

Split into four groups based upon students’ specialisms (CGI, 2-D, etc), the resultant short films were the realisation of three-four days’ work, based on the theme of ‘Animation is a Place’, with all years including post-graduates, represented amongst the participants.

Chris who went on the trip said: “I loved the trip, it was so much better it was a small group of six because it was amazing to get to know students from other years and build really good friendships. The Portuguese students were amazing, they were all friendly and amazing at helping us find different places across Lisbon; it was an amazing experience.”

The open brief allowed the groups space to express their ideas, exploring themes meaningful to the local community. Inspiration included cultural identity and architecture, much of it reflecting the sense of change in the Portuguese capital.

Led by Alex and Senior Lecturer Andrew, and supported by Carol Poole, the students boosted their employability skills and professional experience through elements such as group working, meeting briefs and working to deadline, as well as being encouraged to keep sketchbooks of work, ideas and visual development, and reflect on their experience.

The week-long trip, funded by the Student Opportunity Fund, also helped assist and develop the relationship with the Universidade Lusófona, who are a new Edge Hill University Erasmus partner.

Lauren who also went on the trip said: “The trip presented me with the opportunity to experience a new place, culture and people. There was, of course, a language barrier which we all worked though, and we worked closely together to make sure that everyone understood and executed their parts of the project. Experiences like this have helped me to understand so much better what it will be like to work in a varied, multilingual and multicultural industry like animation.”

See the full article on the trip on the Edge Hill University website: Animation students benefit from Portugal link-up

Artist and photographer Mike McGear-McCartney was joined by animation alumni student Peter Miller (who has been animating and helping to bring Mike’s Weirdo characters which have been in the form of a series of sketches to life) and Prof Roger Shannon and Dr Alex Jukes of Edge Hill University.
Mike first created the characters for Scaffold (the legendary performance group) in the 1970s, Mike discussed the final realisation of his ‘strange’ 2D characters into animated form.

David has been an animator in the games industry since 2013. After completing and getting his first class BA honours degree in animation from Edge Hill University.

David is currently working as an animator for Travellers Tales Games and was part of the team for the BAFTA winning LEGO Dimensions. The Building Blocks of Success

He came to Edge Hill Animation this week to pass on his experienced knowledge to the current crop of 2nd year Animation students undertaking a masterclass in Maya.

Travellers Tales Games is a video game developer and based in Cheshire and produces the Lego video games. Follow the link to see the work they produce.
Tt Games

In response to the Tate’s Op Art in Focus display, Alex, presented an interactive installation, focusing on illusion, repetition, geometric forms and colour.

Titled ‘Optic Space Block‘ is a suspended animated cube from which to play and experiment with spatial illusion. It combines aspects of 3-D CGI technology, projection, fine art and public interaction, using aspects of colour, space and illusion design techniques to explore ideas of a physical and perceptual space.

As part of Edge Hill University’s ‘Festival in a Day’, animator Susan Young came to talk to animation and media students on Wednesday morning about her work, experiences and journey as an animator.

Susan Young is a BAFTA-nominated animation director based in London. Commissioned films include The Doomsday Clock, a film about multilateral disarmament for the United Nations, Beleza Tropical for musician David Byrne, and Jimi Hendrix: Fire, for producer Alan Douglas. Susan’s film, titles, promos and commercials have been screened worldwide and she has served on several international animation festival juries (including Annecy Animation Festival).

Susan has recently returned to drawn animation and the making of Dead Reckoning (2016), is in collaboration with director Paul Wenninger.

Students last week had the chance to work with scriptwriter Andrew Burrell. Andrew has recently written for Matt Groening’s new Netflix show ‘Disenchantment’ and CBBC’s Football drama ‘Jamie Johnson’. Previously he’s done stuff for Disney and Nickelodeon and was lead writer of ‘Danger Mouse’ for CBBC. On Tuesday of last week during class, third year Edge Hill Animation students had the opportunity to discuss their final year project ideas, scripts and development with Andrew.