I went along to the talk given by Rodrigo Sobral (Creative Director from The Mill, London) last Wednesday evening at Northumbria University.
The Mill produce a massive amount of top end big productions and production effects for film, TV and advertising.
The whole angle of his presentation was all about the importance of 'the story' and the established formats we use, that being - BEGINING / MIDDLE / END.
He spoke of how stories were originally passed on through generations by word of mouth and so they would evolve or be embellished upon over time, he translated back to perhaps one of the first established recordings of a story that we still refer to today, that being The Bible, through to the creation of the Gutenberg press making it possible to mass produce stories, setting them in stone which enabled the likes of creative writers such as Shakespeare to generate works that are still being read and adapted in films and screenplays 400 years later.
Rodrigo also acknowledged that the format for story telling has transformed with the advent and growth of the internet to the point where the story no longer ends at the end anymore due to the interactive nature of the internet so that part of the marketing and advertising strategies today encourage and cash in on this evolution of story telling to their own benefit.
From a personal and selfish point of view it would have been nice if he presented more examples of the type of work The Mill has produced and heard him talk about the construction techniques and how it was made, but then I guess that would be a different lecture and at the end of the day you can see for yourself on their website. http://www.themill.com/
As a 'fresh faced' student animator who has only just recently accomplished making cut out animated figures bump along for the first time, the complexity and invisibility of some of the effects used in The Mill's big productions is pretty daunting!
This is their current 2011 show reel:
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