The Ottawa International Animation Festival is the biggest and longest running animation festival in North America. It’s been years since I’ve been to the OIAF but I hope to make it again this autumn. This will be the 50th anniversary of the festival and the 20th anniversary of the 2006 signal film I co-directed with Bruce Alcock when I was a full time director at the inimitable Global Mechanic.
When the festival reached out to us it was a fairly open request - This was for the 30th anniversary year and they pretty much left it up to us. So we gathered a bunch of animators and ran with the Signal Film concept. Each pattern is a different signal flag pattern and together they spell out OIAF2006. We split the shapes up by animator and told 'em to include a duck because who doesn't like ducks?
And for those of you who enjoy time travel, here's the 'making of' video we made for this project:
Asides from Bruce Alcock and Nathaniel Akin, some of the incredible designers and animators that helped us out on this project are Marv Newland, Cesare Battista, Ian Godfrey, Ken Meyers, Deb Dawson, Cliff Saito, Pablo Gonzalez, Steve Hillman, Celest Brown, Scott Kiborn and Paul Boyd (RIP).