Models in the Art of Animation: Artisanship and Industry

In a bid to establish itself as a stable meeting point with a solid commitment to a vocationally different kind of cinema such as animation, for its 65th festival ZINEBI is putting together an event open to professionals operating in this area of visual art. At a time when the animation ecosystem in general – and in the Basque Country in particular – is striving to consolidate positions with industrial production structures, we must not overlook the fact that, with the assistance available through the application of information technology, there are aspects of this genre that are still being handled using more or less artisan techniques.

With the example of the feature film by Isabel Herguera El sueño de la sultana (2023), recently premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, it is at this crossroads between an artisan activity and an organised procedure where the logical trend ought to opt for the industrial (as is the case with companies which, in the global panorama, head up the animation sector, a phenomenon that goes far beyond films), where all the known exponents of animation in Euskadi seem to show up: the joint efforts by young artists who start up at training outlets such as DigiPen or, in the case of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), coordinated by Begoña Vicario; the lengthy processes by Izibene Oñederra, Kote Camacho, Mel Arranz or Aitor Oñederra to produce free, radical work; and chance productions arising from state or international aid launched by Bizkaia promoter UniKo – the aforementioned El sueño de la sultana, for instance, or films by Alberto Vázquez, Martín Romero and Pablo Polledri.

Representatives of a number of different realities of Basque animation come together at this 65th festival which gives priority to exposure of the extensive variety of formats and techniques that animation brings to contemporary filmmaking.

SPEAKERS

Sergio Martínez
Head Digital Art and Animated Production Department at DigiPen in Bilbao

Aitor Oñederra
Animadeba International Animation Film Festival director, animation filmmaker, professor, filmmaker

Izibene Oñederra
Filmmaker

Alberto Vázquez
Filmmaker, screenwriter, illustrator

MODERATOR

Iván Miñambres
UniKo CEO