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I hooked up with my old pals from Uli Meyer's studio in London. I hadn't seen Uli in a year-look how he's grown!
Out on the first evening I bumped into an old friend, Jakob Schuh, director of Studio Soi & teacher at FilmAkademie. We started sketching on themes of dinosaurs & French tarts!
The day after we caught a morning screening of Gabriele Zuchelli's fascinating documentary on animation pioneer Quirino Cristiani. The boys were feeling a little worse for wear.
I was educated & enlightened by the film- Cristiani created what is now considered to be the earliest feature length animated film in 1917. He worked with only Emile Cohl's primitive work as a precedent to learn from, inventing new techniques to realise his first satirical masterpiece 'El Apostol'.
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Cristiani made his films for a mature audience,cartoons weren't for kids in those days. Animation was perceived as part of an evenings' entertainment & no cute talking animals appeared in Cristiani's films. His background in illustration & newspaper cartooning informed his film-making, they were satirical & political with a strong emphasis on caricature. One can't help but wonder what the situation would be today in feature animation if the medium had followed Cristiani's path & not Disney's?
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All the sketches from the official Sketchcrawl event organised by Bannister can be viewed here.
Here are mine:
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The old prison is a sketchcrawl must.
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Le Munich Restaurant where we met every evening before dinner.
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