The winners of this year’s Young Animator of the Year UK award have been announced by Access:VFX, the ScreenSkills Animation Fund and #Dami. Through its awards program, YAY UK aims to provide aspiring animators from a range of backgrounds with access to and advice from professionals and studios in the animation, games and visual effects industry. The winning work will premiere at the Manchester Animation Festival, which runs November 14-19.
CinemaNext has been chosen by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts to be its official projection and sound supplier and integrator. Located in London, BAFTA’s home has recently undergone a major refurbishment. Due to officially open in 2022, it will be a creative center for film, games and television and the central hub for the Academy’s UK-wide, and global, learning and talent development programs.
Christie’s CP4440-RGB projector is being used as the flagship projection technology at the 65th annual British Film Institute’s London Film Festival, running now through October 17. For the first time the event will be held at the prestigious Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on the south bank of the Thames, where the concert hall will be turned into the main festival gala cinema. With a seating capacity for 2,200 cinema goers, it will become one of the largest cinema experiences in the country.
Twickenham Film Studios, London, has named Jack Watts head of technology and standards. Managing director Cara Sheppard made the announcement. Watts’ hiring follows the appointment of Tomasz Witkowski as director of technology & engineering and head of picture Stuart Bryce.
While it has been widely understood that, because of the pandemic, 2020 was a terrible year for the cinema business, a new report from the European Audiovisual Observatory documents just how bad it really was. The theatrical market collapsed in 2020 with cinema attendance in the EU and the UK plummeting by 70.2 percent to an estimated 300 million tickets, down from more than one billion admissions in 2019 (the highest level since 2004). Gross box office earnings dropped correspondingly from Euro 7.20 billion to Euro 2.13 billion (US 2.4 billion), down by 70.4 percent from 2019, as the average ticket price in the EU remained stable at Euro 7.1 (USD 8.1).
