I recently did a guest talk at RMIT for the BA Animation students about my work and what I’d been doing since I finished uni all those years ago – and it got me thinking about ANIMATION CLUB!!!
For those of you that haven’t heard of ANIMATION CLUB!!! before, it was created out of the AIM animation class in 2006 and was the earliest incarnation of what is now Loop de Loop.
We had a weekly (yes, weekly) animation challenge on a topic and the winner picked the next topic. There was a while there that every Wednesday was taken over by these challenges (making them, screening them and then celebrating them with dumplings and beer) that I’m sure we drove our lecturers up the wall!
We made short films and entered film competitions and had stuff screened all around Melbourne – generally silly stuff we’d made in a few hours before the Wednesday 5pm deadline.
One of the cooler projects we got involved with was for the Melbourne Fringe Festival, where someone thought it was a smart idea to give us a van and some projectors and laptops and let us drive around the city projecting animations on buildings. A website tracked our position and people could chat to us online and see live feeds of what we were projecting and what was happening in the area around us.
I found a short video online that shows a bit of this setup – the video is pretty dodgy quality, but you get the idea. This is us projecting onto Federation Square. (Should be pointed out that we had no approvals to project there and decided to stop on a whim because there was a nice flat wall. The security guard was nice enough/silly enough to let us go for it)