Well, where to begin!
It's been a dream of ours from day one to take our little cinema to Pictoplasma in Berlin, if you weren't aware this is the biggest character design festival in Europe, it's where fellow creatives meet to attend screenings, workshops, talks and have a party!
After asking for a few year's we were delighted to be accepted by Pete and Lars the festival organisers, there was one snag though, we had to raise the funds to get there!
Pushed by our friends Gary and Emma over at Neighbourhood Store we decided to launch a Crowdfunder to help pay for transport and costs as it was going to be a week long trip!
To our surprise we actually raised what we needed and we were heading to Berlin!
We wanted to do something meaningful content wise and felt really strongly about featuring work by animators that had not showed something at the sought after festival before. So we decided with the support of Picto we do a call out for artists.
With over 200 submissions we were overwhelmed but happy. We learn't a lot during this process so we knew if we were to ever do that again we would need to be more organised.
What we ended up with was 12 showreels of amazing work from makers based all around the world, we had work submitted by students, established animators and we were really happy with how they all worked with each other.
Now we were set for the journey, the two day drive across three countries was fun and something we never dreamed of doing when we first started.
After a nights stay in Western Germany we finally reached the amazing venue Silent Green in Berlin. The venue was amazing, an old cremetorium come multi purpose venue.
The guys at the festival also gave us the best spot at the entrance of the venue so footfall was guaranteed which was great.
The festival went well, we had over 1200 bums on our little cinema seat and had just the best time with good friends.
Would we go again...of course we would!
Finally it goes without saying we need to say thanks to a fai few people who helped us along the way. So thanks to all those who donated, Gary and Emma at Neighbourhood, Lars and Peter at Pictoplasma, Mirna our Berlin tour guide and finally all our buddies at the festival who gave us great feedback and an amazing weekend!
Paulie x