15th

Pictoplasma
Conference & Festival
Berlin

08 – 12 MAY 2019

This May 08–12, the 15th annual Pictoplasma Berlin Festival awaited all international character pioneers, creators, artists, newcomers and enthusiasts for a special 5 day celebration of contemporary character design and art!

Creators and producers met for a central conference to exchange strategies for figurative aesthetics, while the wider festival awaited the general public with cutting edge screenings that bring the latest animation to the big cinema screen, numerous exhibitions throughout the city presented original works and outstanding character craftsmanship, and performances put the characters into direct play with the audience.

CONFERENCE

ARTIST TALKS,
LECTURES AND PRESENTATIONS

09 – 11 MAY 2019

At the heart of the festival, the central Pictoplasma Conference presents 21 key lectures by the world’s most influential artists and upcoming talents, cutting-edge graphic and game designers and leading animation filmmakers, offering the chance to learn from and be inspired by some of today’s most innovative and avant-garde artists.

2019 PICTOTALKS NOW AVAILABLE AS DOWNLOAD
FOR YOUR COMFORTABLE HOME-EDUTAINMENT!

2019 / Sweden

Anna Mantzaris

33’46’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 256MB

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Anna Mantzaris is a multi-award winning Swedish animation director based in London. Working in stop motion and felt puppets, her work is often character-driven and mixes humor and melancholy. Anna is represented by Passion Studios, where she directs various types of commercials and commissions, most recently a Christmas advert for Greenpeace.

2019 / Spain, UK

Cabeza Patata

27’47’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 243MB

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Cabeza Patata is the artistic duo of English craftswoman and illustrator Katie Menzies, and Spanish 3D artist and animator Abel Reverter. They create joyful and diverse characters who emanate strength, in an ongoing exploration of diversity. With their bold colors and lollypop heads, these characters spring up everywhere from street murals in Barcelona to 3D animations for the Royal Society for the Arts.

2019 / Germany

Cornelia Geppert

25’37’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 192MB

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Cornelia Geppert is CEO and creative head of Jo-Mei Games, where she is about to release her own adventure video game: In Sea of Solitude a young woman named Kay explores an abandoned, submerged city to find out why she has turned into a monster. Cornelia describes the project as her most personal and artistic to date, leading her to probe her own fears and emotions.

2019 / Egypt

dina Amin

33’30’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 344MB

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dina Amin is a designer from Cairo who loves to explore the intersections between disciplines. In 2016, she started a project on Instagram called Tinker Friday, where she combined her passion for product design with stop motion to reflect on consumer culture. In this animated series dina reveals what’s inside the countless things people throw away.

2019 / Germany

Elenor Kopka

Elenor Kopka is a freelance animator and illustrator best known for her grainy, black-and-white wormlike characters and ever-mutating blobs. Her animated shorts, GIFs and music videos draw inspiration from ghosts and cartoon metamorphosis. Her clients include Adult Swim, MTV, City Slang Records and Giphy.

2019 / Switzerland

Félicie Haymoz

29’07’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 229MB

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Félicie Haymoz was born in Switzerland and lives in Brooklyn. She took her first steps as a character designer on the animated feature Max&Co and has become Wes Anderson’s go-to character creator for his stop motion features: first on Fantastic Mr. Fox, for which she was the lead character designer tasked with turning Hollywood A-listers into lovable furry animals, and then on Isle of Dogs, for which she designed the human characters.

2019 / Poland

Iza Rutkowska

32’13’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 335MB

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Iza Rutkowska is a Polish visual artist, designer, educator, and cultural manager who uses artistic tools to integrate communities and instigate social change. Focussing on education as process, she has worked with children to build playgrounds and the residents of buildings to design their backyards, equipping them with sustainable skills to develop projects independently.

2019 / Netherlands

J. W. Nijman & Kitty Calis

19’30’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 253MB

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Kitty Calis and Jan Willem Nijman recently released the famed adventure Minit—a game played in sixty second increments. Players leave home to help unusual folk, uncover secrets, and overcome dangerous foes, all in the hope of lifting a curse that ends each day after just one minute. With its minimalist, black and white design, the game echoes early arcade culture and features an iconic beaked character.

2019 / USA

Jeron Braxton

41’50’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 620MB

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Jeron Braxton is a self taught 3D animator exploring the Black American experience via surreal Playstation 2 aesthetics. Glucose, his short film investigating the colonial history of sugar as the engine of the slave trade, won the Short Film Jury Award for Animation at Sundance Festival 2018.

2019 / UK

John Bond

27’01’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 229MB

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John Bond is an illustrator, author, and artist from the UK working in animation and online media as well as print and painting. He has produced and directed projects for clients such as BBC, Disney, Channel 4, MTV, and Tate. His debut picture book Mini Rabbit Not Lost was published by Harper Collins in 2018. John utilizes a cast of charming characters (typically dogs) to explore the endless quirks and innocence of our day-to-day existence.

2019 / USA

Justin K. Thompson

Justin K. Thompson is an award-winning production designer who recently worked in this capacity on the latest feature film by Sony Pictures Animation, Academy Award winner Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Previously he designed Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and its sequel. Prior to joining Sony Pictures Animation, Thompson worked at The Orphanage Animation Studios, The Jim Henson Company,

2019 / Ireland

Laura Callaghan

31’46’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 198MB

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Laura Callaghan is an Irish illustrator living and working in South East London. Her work is largely hand painted using watercolor, Indian ink, and isograph pen to depict strong young women in colorful, maximalist environments. Part fashion illustration, part satire of the representation of women in society and social media, she creates images that are bright and beautiful but infused with awkwardness and malaise.

2019 / UK

Laurie Rowan

30’35’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 376MB

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Laurie Rowan is an award winning animator and illustrator based on the south coast of England. After a decade of working within the creative industries for high profile clients and campaigns including BBC, Channel 4, MTV, Disney, and Google, Laurie decided to branch out with his own brand of wobbly characters, exploring grotesque corporeality, rhythm and movement.

2019 / UK

Luke Pearson

28’32’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 169MB

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Luke Pearson is an illustrator and comic book artist who lives in Nottingham. He is best known as the creator of the Hilda series of graphic novels and for the Netflix animated series produced by Silvergate Media based on them.

2019 / Germany

Nikita Diakur

35’43’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 495MB

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Nikita Diakur is a Russian-born filmmaker based in Germany. His most distinguished projects Ugly and Fest have received multiple awards and have screened at film festivals around the world. His signature technique is dynamic computer simulation that radically embraces spontaneity, randomness, and mistakes.

2019 / Switzerland

Olaf Breuning

Olaf Breuning works in photography, drawing, sculpture, video and installation, tackling the big existential questions tongue-in-cheek, and always with a healthy disrespect for the art world. Fusing high art and mass culture, the human—often in cartoonish form—is always at the center of his endeavors. His countless international exhibitions include a major retrospective at NRW-Forum Düsseldorf and a solo show at Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

2019 / New Zealand

Parallel Teeth

32’43’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 480MB

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Parallel Teeth is the artistic moniker of animation director and illustrator Robert Wallace, famed for his energetic style, full of playful characters and bold color. Robert combines his interest in the occult with hazy memories of Sunday morning cartoons to create music videos, commercials, GIFs, album artwork, projections, 360 videos and everything in between.

2019 / UK

Philippa Rice

25’08’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 199MB

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Philippa Rice is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Soppy. She is an artist who works in a number of different media from comics, illustration, animation, model making to crochet. Her other works include the collage-based webcomic My Cardboard Life and her stop-motion animated crochet characters. Philippa lives in Nottingham, UK, with her partner Luke Pearson and their daughter.

2019 / Poland

Sos Sosowski

23’56’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 501MB

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Self-proclaimed mad scientist of video games, Sos Sosowski is a former school teacher turned game jam addict and recently embarked on a quest to create the worst video game ever. The result is Mosh Pit Simulator—a VR experience about a world overrun by brainless, boneless, nipple-less humanoids, desperately trying to continue life as usual (shopping, going on dates, driving cars). It’s up to you, the player, to show empathy—or get in their way.

2019 / Spain

Twee Muizen

33’06’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 205MB

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Twee Muizen is the artistic duo of fine artist Denís Galocha and fashion designer Cristina Barrientos. Both grew up in villages near Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, surrounded by mountains, animals and nature—all of which figure prominently in their work. After a period of working in Amsterdam, they moved to Barcelona where they spend most of their time in their workshop and gallery, creating murals, fake taxidermy, paintings, and costumes.

2019 / China

Yukai Du

33’00’’, 1080p mp4 (H.264), 411MB

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Growing up in China, Yukai Du moved to London to study at Central Saint Martins where she graduated five years ago. She works in both still and moving images for a list of major brands. Yukai draws inspiration from Impressionism, using layerings of dots and dashes to create kaleidoscopic surfaces of light particles and pattern, combined with a love for the simplistic and geometric structures of Brutalism.

EXHIBITIONS

CHARACTER WALK

08 – 12 MAY 2019

A Character Walk in Mitte showcased exhibitions by ten artists, many of whom presented their work in Berlin for the first time.
At Silent Green, the former crematorium in Wedding, a group show zoomed in on the charged space between viewers and the viewed, with multimedia installations that probed the unreciprocated emotions between humans and virtual characters.

SCREENINGS

ANIMATION
SCREENINGS

09 – 12 MAY 2019

At Babylon on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, a new selection of no less than eighty hand-picked animated shorts lighted up the screen in four thematic programs full of psychedelic eye candy and ingenious storytelling—a far cry from family entertainment.

15th

Pictoplasma
Conference & Festival
Berlin

08 – 12 MAY 2019

ARTIST TALKS,
LECTURES AND PRESENTATIONS

09 – 11 MAY 2019

Anna Mantzaris

Cabeza Patata

Cornelia Geppert

dina Amin

Elenor Kopka

Félicie Haymoz

Iza Rutkowska

J. W. Nijman & Kitty Calis

Jeron Braxton

John Bond

Justin K. Thompson

Laura Callaghan

Laurie Rowan

Luke Pearson

Nikita Diakur

Olaf Breuning

Parallel Teeth

Philippa Rice

Sos Sosowski

Twee Muizen

Yukai Du

CHARACTER WALK

08 – 12 MAY 2019

ANIMATION
SCREENINGS

09 – 12 MAY 2019

PICTOPLASMA

PICTOCONFERENCE

PICTOACADEMY

PICTOFOLIO

PICTOSHOP

CONTACT

15th

PictoplasmaConference & FestivalBerlin

08 – 12 MAY 2019

ARTIST TALKS,LECTURES AND PRESENTATIONS

09 – 11 MAY 2019

CHARACTER WALK

08 – 12 MAY 2019

ANIMATION SCREENINGS

09 – 12 MAY 2019

Added to Cart

Pictoplasma
Conference & Festival
Berlin

ARTIST TALKS,
LECTURES AND PRESENTATIONS

ANIMATION
SCREENINGS