Multi-platforms, multi-culture, multi-food...

We're eating a lot of food here. We have a large buffet breakfast in the mornings, then a paid-for lunch which is a big cooked meal, then snacks throughout the day in the lecture room and evening meals... animators obviously need nurishing, in more way than one.

To elaborate slightly on our time with Harrison Ellenshaw... a lot of what he dealt with involved more traditionalist ways of thinking, grounded approaches & techniques and ways of storytelling which have transcended the 'golden age' of Hollywood. He talked about various practitioners from Powell and Pressburger to George Lucas - it was interesting revisiting the early Star Wars films, on which Ellenshaw did effects work, these are pieces of cinema that I really grew up with, they taught me filmmaking, they made me want to make films and take audiences on amazing journeys to amazing places. I don't have time to now, but I'd love, at some point, to write a list of films which I think are critical to my ambitions now as a filmmaker and how they affected the way I think and work in the way I do.

So if Ellenshaw was looking to the past to inspire us, today's session, taken by the charismatic Mike Dicks, looked to the future. Check out Mike's linkedIn profile for info on his career - he's really on the cutting edge of developing formats and ideas within 'new media'. He talked content, multi-platform storytelling and usages, viewsers (a neat new media term for video users) and more. It really opened my eyes to ways of working I'd never considered before and he went into a lot of interesting detail about the internet, how it works and ways of harnessing it for good use.

All food for thought and I started getting excited about things like digital interactivity which isn't a thought I'd normally relish but I guess part of the point of this course is that we open ourselves up to new ways of thinking.

Flavio Perez, one of the animation producers on ASF has created a blog for us all to share photos, thoughts, comentaries, work etc made on and around ASF 09-10. Do subscribe and take a look around if you're interested in seeing who we all are and what we're up to.

Me, Nicole Gallagher and Laetitia Grandjean. Image: Flavio Perez

Free things are always nice. I won a competition on the wonderful Imagine Animation network to get a signed copy of the new updated, extended, brilliant Animators Survival Kit by Mr Richard Williams. Thanks to the lovely people at Imagine for doing these competitions.