Blackrock Animation Film Festival

Above is the animation my students created during the sand animation workshops I hosted with Imelda Donohoe, at this year's Blackrock Animation Film Festival.

We facilitated two classes; one with a group of special needs students from the Carmona Society, and another with a mixture of students aged 7-17 years old.

We started the classes by screening Meldy's recently completed sand-animation film "Struck Emotion" and Caroline Leaf's "The Owl Who Married a Goose."

Below are some spooky looking photos from the workshop, that show the students hard at work:

We were lucky enough to have a visit from Merlin Crossingham near the end of the second class. Merlin was over for the festival, giving a lecture on his work with Aardman as creative director of Wallace & Gromit and animation supervisor, we almost tricked him into doing some sand animation himself. You can read a little interview with him here: LINK

Special thanks to festival director Fionnghuala Neill, the Carmona Society, and all the board and staff of Urban Junction in Blackrock.

Rubbish Express wins at BAFF 2012!

My student's film "Rubbish Express" won Best Animation in the 12-18 year old category at the Blackrock Animation Film Festival last weekend.

This award is a well deserved acknowledgement of the student's hard work and ingenuity, and I hope after watching the film you think so too.


"Strange little green men have come up with a novel solution to their rubbish problem
- Dump it on Earth!"


Rubbish Express was created over 5 days in April, by Adam Cantwell-Xenopoulos, Sasha Lorigan, Philippe Lorigan, Sean McInerney, April Mooney, Amber Mooney and Ruby McAlister.

It was one of four films produced during a 2 week long animated film workshop, hosted by myself along with Pádraig Fagan and Carol Freeman, featuring original music by Chris McLoughlin. You can find all four films here, as well as a behind the scenes showing how the students animated the films.

This workshop was an initiative of the PURE Project, along with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.

Also, if you are curious, we have recently completed four more environmental workshop films, during the 2nd Annual PURE Wicked Animation Film School. You can find those films here.

Below you can see some photograph's showing the workshop in full swing

Enjoy! And thanks for reading.