Northern Vermont University Hosts Eighth Annual Vermont Animation Festival 

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• Northern Vermont University students filming

"With animation, you can literally do anything," said Kate Renner, assistant professor of visual art at Northern Vermont University in Lyndon. "You can make animals fly. It's pretty magical that way."

This weekend, Vermonters will experience some of that magic at the eighth annual Vermont Animation Festival. The two-day event — Friday and Saturday, March 24 and 25, at various locations on the NVU campus — includes a panel discussion on the animation industry in northern New England, workshops with industry experts, and a screening of animated shorts from emerging and veteran animators. While the festival is run by and largely intended for NVU students, it is open to all animators, from the professional to the aspiring.

In addition to celebrating the wizardry of animation, the fest is also an opportunity for local animators to learn from the pros, said Renner, the festival director. On Saturday, she leads a workshop called "Analog to AR: Creating Augmented Reality Animation," which aims to teach animators how to make films using simple tools.

"A lot of people think you need a fancy app or computer or ... Adobe Creative Cloud, and you don't," she said. "You can create really amazing work with a phone and some household objects. It doesn't need to be really resource-intensive."

Renner suggested that participants will be pleasantly surprised that animation "isn't necessarily Pixar" and that it's something they can do themselves at home. The workshop will be available both in person and virtually on Zoom.

Friday evening features the fest's keynote speakers, animators Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter. The married couple both teach at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and were nominated for an Academy Award for their 2017 short film, "Negative Space."

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• A still from "Negative Space" by Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter

Porter said they plan to share some of the behind-the-scenes work from the Oscar-nominated stop-motion film and will offer a sneak preview of Porcelain Birds, a feature-length film that they've been working on for four years. Their new project is loosely based on Kuwahata's experience coming from Japan to the United States as a foreign exchange student in the late 1990s.

Kuwahata and Porter will also facilitate a workshop called "Sensory Character Development." As Porter told Seven Days, the workshop was developed around sensory prompts "to help people get to that ideating phase quicker based on observation, memory and embodied experience." Porter and Kuwahata ask participants to come up with character concepts based on various senses — smell, taste, touch, etc.

"The goal of the workshop is to get people more comfortable creating their own characters and bringing their ideas to life," Porter said.

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• Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter

Attendees will also have the opportunity to learn from veteran animation story artist Kevin Harkey. A California native, Harkey has lived in Vermont since 2002. His work has provided the blueprints for a long list of animated classics, from Beauty and the Beast (1991) to Frozen (2013).

His Saturday afternoon workshop will focus on storyboards, the series of drawings that determine how the visual story of an animated film will progress through framing, camera perspective and character movement. The sketches are often loose and simple but must be interpretable by the rest of the animation team.

"I was taught to almost make the drawings be another language so that people would instantly understand what I was trying to communicate in drawing form," Harkey explained.

The workshop, Harkey noted, will focus on the fundamentals of making a storyboard. "A lot of times, it gets daunting and overwhelming," he said. "I'm just going to try to break it down to where somebody can do it on their own and have a beginning, middle and end to a story."

Both Harkey's and Renner's workshops are open to young animators — Renner's to ages 10 and up; Harkey's to as young as 12.

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• Still from a film by Alec Longstreth from the 2022 Vermont Animation Festival

"Animation is very collaborative at every step of the process," Renner said, noting that families sign up for workshops together. "Kids have some really great ideas, and sometimes their parents help them with the more technical aspects. Last year we did a workshop and didn't put an age limit on it; we've had kids as young as 4 do them."

The festival also provides a unique opportunity for students and emerging artists to have their work screened alongside that of industry veterans. Renner said the screening, which follows the keynote on Friday, is a special event for the Northeast Kingdom and a chance for students and hobbyists to get their work in front of an audience, often for the first time.

Said Renner: "Many of the films have never been seen by anyone except the folks who created them."