Stop-motion animator Barry Purves was a guest speaker at the Bradford Animation Festival, UK in November 2011. In this video clip he talks about story structure with illustrations from his latest animation project entitled Plume.

Barry has won over sixty major international awards, including Grand Prix, Best Director, Best Film, and OSCAR and BAFTA nominations.

Barry’s films are known for their innovation, passion, elegance, lush visuals and fresh interpretations, and he has directed and animated some 70 commercials, title sequences and animation inserts for films and pop promos.

Sylvain Chomet discusses his approach to animating. This is an excerpt from the BBC documentary “The Secret of Drawing”. It starts with a brief history of animation followed by animator Sylvain Chomet talking as he animates. The work shown is an early test animation for “The Illusionist”.

The animated characters of “Rango” come to life in the town of Dirt, thanks to the visual effects wizards at Industrial Light and Magic. This video shows Johnny Depp, who voiced the lizard character, and Bill Nighy recording the sound with comments from the animators. Rango was directed by Gore Verbinski.

This video traces the development of animated creatures in live action movies. Starting with the puppets of King Kong animated by Willis O’Brien it moves on the computer graphics characters we are familiar with today. The video was produced by Inrd Shelby who points out that it is for educational purposes only and no copyright infringement is intended.

25 years ago John Lasseter revolutionised the animation industry by creating the worlds first feature-length computer animated film. This video visits John’s house at the start of his day, where we see his collection of 370 Hawaiian shirts, his train library and his luxurious movie theatre. Then he jumps into his chauffeur driven car and is off to the Pixar studio…

This is a priceless clip from the 1970s BBC children’s program the Do-It-Yourself Animation Show, hosted by Bob Godfrey. In this episode Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam explains how he made his famous animations. It is amazing how these techniques are still used in Photoshop to make animated gifs and so on. The man is and was a visionary.

More behind the scenes views of Gulp, Aardman’s world record breaking short, on location at Carmarthenshire’s Pendine Sands in South Wales. It reveals what went in to making such a complex film away from the controlled environment of a studio.

Aardman animation and Nokia attempt to set a new world record with their huge film ‘Gulp’. In this clip sand artist Jamie Wardley explains how they went about animating with sand in a race against the tide.

A sensuous female is brought to life with pencil animation in the Philips 女孩陰毛 commercial. The clip announces that it does not use rotoscoping and goes on to prove it. Amazing work from Alberto Mielgo who is a master draughtsman with great control over colour and light as well as a skilful animator.

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Are you confused about why tax payers are still having to pay for the banking crisis? I am. Whilst looking for more information I came across this video from Canadian artist and film maker Paul Grignon. It tells the history of banking, narrated by a soothing voice, that could lead to a bland presentation, but the message of the film will have your blood boiling, unless you happen to be a banker who is profiting from debt. A revised version of this video was made in 2009 to give a partial response to the global economic crisis of 2008.