AVA Academia

Skwigly animation magazine interviews AVA authors

The popular online animation magazine Skwigly has just featured an interview with the author of Basics Animation 04: Stop-Motion, Barry Purves. You can read the first part of the interview here. Barry talks about his latest film, Tchaikovsky, what inspires him, the state of the animation industry today, respect for puppets and never being bored at work. Barry's enthusiasm and passion for animation come across in everything he writes, so we recommend you check it out, along with this interview he did for our blog and his book of course!

Nancy Beiman, author of Animated Performance, has also just taken part in a podcast for Skwigly which will be released next month.

Bread and Roses Film Festival

In 1912, textile workers in Massachusetts USA went on strike for improved working conditions. This uprising became known as the Bread and Roses Strike. 200 Polish immigrant women workers sparked the strike, and thousands more came to lead it. They achieved landmark reforms on working conditions and pay despite facing great opposition and intimidation from industrialists and the political establishment. To commemmorate the 100 year anniversary, Natasha Caruana (co-author of Basics Creative Photography 03: Behind the Image) is co-directing the Bread and Roses Film Festival in London. The festival launches on Friday 27th 2012, 6pm - 9pm, and takes places in Clapham South London. Highlights of the festival include talks and workshops, open studios and film screenings at Clapham Common Bandstand, the oldest and largest Bandstand of London. Other festival highlights include themed days: Family Unite, Law & Disorder, Strike, Arab Spring, Worker Past & Future, Unpaid Internships and Casual Labour and Promises & Lies. There will be a screening of Ken Loach's film, Bread and Roses (pictured), on Wednesday 2nd May at 4pm. Other films being screened encompass documentary, fiction (from sc-fi to archive films from the London Screen Collection), shorts and ethnographic films. For more information and to book, visit the studioSTRIKE website. All the events are free.

Clerkenwell Design Week 2012

It's that time of year again...on 22-24th May 2012, London will host Clerkenwell Design Week. With over 60 showrooms, international visitors and a mixture of workshops, presentations and product launches, if you can't make it to Milan in April, Clerkenwell is a great place to meet others in the creative design community and see many of these new products. Exhibitions will take place in The Farmiloe Building, the House of Detention (a subterranean Victorian prison) and the new venue of the Order of St John Church. Visit the website for more details and you can also register here.

AVA is on Pinterest!

We are pleased to announce that AVA is now on Pinterest. We have been pinning away and hope that we can give a flavour of the content of our books whilst also sharing images that inspire us. Find AVA on Pinterest here and see what you think! We would be grateful for any feedback.

Minimalist design

We have seen some great examples recently of the great work which people are posting on blogs. Our favourite recent examples are these minimalist 20 posters for Disney classics and these posters by Christian Jackson for classic children's stories. It's great to see such well known and well loved tales reenergised with brand new design concepts. They are fun, quirky and, if you know the films or stories, instantly recognisable. The ability to say so much with so little is incredibly powerful.

We try to keep our list of favourite blogs on our own AVA blog updated so check those out for inspiration or let us know if we are missing a blog you love! And TV fans may enjoy guessing which shows these posters relate to...