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ACT Filmmakers’ Reach Tropfest Finals, An Achievement Not To Be Sneezed At!
02 Feb 07
A team of local ACT Filmakers headed by Simon Weaving and Dan Miller were announced today as one of 16 Finalists in the Sony Tropfest Short Film Festival. Their animated feature “The Story of Ned” was chosen from a pool of over 600 entries to feature in the Australia-wide screenings of what is generally considered to be Australia’s leading short film festival.
Written and directed by Simon Weaving and animated by staff and graduates of AIE education, “The story of Ned” follows Ned, the story-book child of a detective novel and a children’s book on a quest to find his own ending.
Dan Miller, Teacher at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE) acted as Art Director and Lead Animator, leading a thirteen-strong animation team who have been studying the Diploma of Screen animation course jointly offered by AIE and Faculty of Design at CIT. The graduates of AIE education, worked tirelessly to ensure the story’s unique visual style.
The 7 minute film took over 500 animation hours to complete, as each character, environment and action needs to be created and manipulated digitally. Mr Miller stated, “In traditional film-making many of the elements such as environments already exist. In animation you need to create all the elements meaning the process is a lot more creative, but also a lot more time consuming.”
Mr Miller said, “It was an awesome experience to lead the team of skilled AIE graduates and emerge with a film of such quality. We all enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with seasoned professionals such as Simon and John Doyle (of Roy and HG fame), who voiced the piece.”
In addition to their Tropfest success, Dan Miller and AIE Diploma of Screen students also developed an animated video clip for local ACT band Meatbee in response to a film clip competition for their latest single, “Just for Me”. A team of 9 AIE students took out the top honors, Meatbee are hoping to use the clip on their upcoming national DVD release.
Ian Gibson, AIE’s Chief Executive Officer stated that “AIE is extremely proud of Dan and the team’s achievements. We’ve long been recognised as a national leader in Games education but it’s grand to see the film side of our training now gaining recognition as well. It is great to see the huge amount of hard work paying off for the team and also encouraging to see so many more short film projects being undertaken by local directors, producers and writers in the ACT.”
Make sure you check out all the Tropfest finalists at Stage 88 on Sunday 18th of February! More information on the Tropfest website www.tropfest.com.au.
For More Information, please contact:
Matt Wheatley
Marketing and Communications
Academy of Interactive Entertainment – Canberra
Phone: (02) 6162 5131
