This week the Trinity Art Department hosted two professional artists who both spoke to students on their area of expertise.
Stop-motion animation
We welcomed Jess Chowdhury, animator and filmmaker, who is currently studying a further course with the Aardman Academy. She talked about her journey from GCSE Art where she struggled to find her niche, to embracing filmmaking, stop-motion animation and creating a digital portfolio for her coursework. Jess discussed studying Fine Art, being committed to your chosen medium and the more challenging art of self-promotion.
She also shared some practical tips on stop-animation such as planning, materials, lighting and pacing. Jess reminded them that stop-animation can be painstakingly slow, with a 6 second piece of video taking 4-5 hours! This will be very useful as the students embark on their own experiments with stop-motion animation soon.
A very inspiring talk, with lots of examples of her work shared (available to watch HERE on her Youtube channel) and she even brought in some of the incredible models she uses.
Photography
We were also thrilled to welcome back Trinity alumnus Andy Wickes (Class of 1994) who gave a fantastic talk to our photography students.
Andy has a photography, video, print design, animation and interaction background and is currently the Digital Director of a boutique creative agency. Our students were inspired!
Andy shared some great stories from his career, starting out as an in-demand photographer in the Britpop days of how back in the Britpop days, capturing the culture and taking photos of musicians such as Justine Frischmann from Elastica and Graham Cox from Blur.
Andy then went onto develop his skills in CGI, produced the CGI effects in the film ‘The Perfect Storm’ (2000) starring George Clooney.
The students asked Andy what he wished he had learned before leaving Trinity and he replied, “The pitch process. The idea of having to sell something. Particularly in the creative world, you need to be able to stand up in a room and ultimately convince somebody to buy your product. An awesome personality might be good enough if you’re Francis Bacon or Damien Hirst, but otherwise you need to be able to look somebody in the eye and say ‘this is why you need me’ or ‘this is why this is better than what you have got now’.”
Thank you so much for Jess and Andy for giving their time to speak to students, we all left inspired.
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