February Club Night

The February Club meeting started with the Annual General Meeting.

This is an activity we all want to be completed as quickly as possible, not least because until its over we can’t get to see Dave Skertchly give us his Animation update. The major announcement from the AGM was the good news that the SBMM annual subscription rates are being held at the same level as they were last year of £42 per individual member. (Indeed it’s now been several years now since the subs were last increased, so well done to the committee for managing the spending!) 

Good news indeed!

So, after the light relief of the AGM, we settled down ready for the serious part of the evening – Dave’s Animation Presentation.

Dave also had this slot last year, so he’s a familiar face when it comes to animation. During the past year Dave has been busy learning new skills and also undertaken his first term at the local Farnham UCA (University for Creative Arts). We were reliably informed that its rated as one of the best in the country.

Dave shared some of the work he’d done; showed some of the entries into  Animation Festivals across the country; and gave us an sneak preview of his new character ‘UG’. Ug is both an real pottery puppet as well as a digital character in his video. 

Dave is not known for overly spending on his video projects, utilizing a very much ‘make and make do’ mentality, so it came as a bit of a shock to discover he had gone over to the ‘dark side’.

Firstly he showed off his impressive Wacom Tablet (that he said he had paid real money for), but then reeled off the names of a host of  top tier software that came free with his course. Clearly a very changed Dave!

After the break Dave took us through a real-time demo of some of those software tools, and showed how he had created and animated some of his characters, all of which worked without hitch. A very entertaining evening during which there was something for everyone.

Big thanks to Dave for keeping us fully entertained for the best part of two hours!