Manchester Animation Festival: Making it in Manchester

Speakers:
Phil Chalk - Factory
Leo Casserly - Flix Facilities
Chris Bowden - Mackinnon & Saunders


The Making it in Manchester talk that I attended on the Tuesday was also really insightful. The speakers all talked about their experiences and how they made their way into "this crazy business" and I found it really useful to hear about these different ways. It seems that the general theme running throughout these talks is to just get your work out there, but here are a few more things that I took away from this talk in particular:

- Don't say no. (Debatable depending on the client and the brief, but on a whole don't say no to projects. Some maybe a little challenging and different to the work you're used to doing, but it is all experience and it gets you doing work and building your skills).
- It "doesn't hurt to have more than one string to your bow". Not all clients are looking for someone who is specialized in one area, sometimes it's also useful to know how to perform in a variety of different areas.
- It isn't always about "raw talent", sometimes it's about the understanding or being able to project manage. Sometimes it's about the CHARACTER.
- "Get your foot in the door, it's a people business".

On a slightly different note: It is very rare that you see text in a pre-school animation and this is so it can be easily translated for other languages and countries. This also means that there doesn't tend to be puns, instead the humor is more universally understood.


This talk definitely made me feel less worried about not knowing fully what I want to do/specialize in, as it was made clear that different people are searching for different things, and in front of me sat animators/creative professionals some of which had a variety of different skills under their belt.