Beauty Inside Art

Hello everyone. I hope you're all well, unlike me. I'm recovering from a horrible cold. Don't laugh at me, I know, nobody gets ill during the summer, but I did. Due to the fact that I was feeling horrible this past week, I wasn't able to blog as much I wanted to. I had some posts half-ready that I was planning to complete during the weekend and schedule them for this week, but I was incapable of doing that.

Anyway, let's talk about a short road trip I went on, with four of my friends, on the 17th of July. My final stop motion animation project that was created for my second year at university, was shown at the opening night of the 2014 Animafest Cyprus, Views of the World, Animation Festival. Like I said, the animated, experimental, short film was created for my uni animation course, not for the festival. I had no intention of sending it to the festival, until my tutor suggested it. I was so thrilled when it got accepted, even though I wasn't very proud of it. If you'd be interested in watching it, let me know, and I'll post it.

At first I had trouble with transportation, as I live in a horrible country that has no trains and no buses at nighttime. My best friend that drives was unable to take me and nobody from my family could either. Lastly, I decided to ask my other best friend whether her boyfriend would be kind enough to take us and thank god he was. They asked another couple to join us, and we took off during the afternoon. 

Since we were going to Paphos - which is another city, we decided to get there a bit early and check out the new Kings Avenue Mall they have. It has a very interesting piece, that gives the illusion of water dripping from the ceiling, in the middle of the mall. You can see I took quite a few pictures of that. Those two alien heads belong to me and my lovely best friend Lydia. We were playing with an iPad in a store and we took that stunning photo, and I couldn't just leave it there to be deleted. After doing some window shopping, we decide to eat at Burger King - I had only had Burger King once before and I wasn't a big fan. Lydia and I went for a grilled chicken burger, but we had no idea how spicy it was! We were burning and I wasn't able to finish it at the end.

The blurry photo below is one that Lydia took when the presenter asked all the animators/directors to join him there. She doesn't know how to focus with a DSRL, so the result was out of focus pictures, but that's okay. In case you can't tell, I'm the one with the black dress. Next to me is my friend from uni, Irene, who has just created a blog about her work as a multimedia designer. If you check out her blog - link - you'll see quite a few photos of myself, as I've been her model for some of our projects, as she has been for me.

The last photo was taken as we were leaving the place of the festival. It took place in that medieval castle, which was surprisingly close to the airport. One thing I would like to add is that I was surprised at how starry the sky looked that night. It was absolutely beautiful, but sadly I was unable to capture a good photo of the sky without a tripod.

At the end of the day, I'm very glad I got the opportunity to showcase my work in front of an audience, even though there weren't that many people on the first day and probably most of them didn't even understand it or liked it. I'm proud of my animated film, because I know my abilities and how hard I worked for it. The most important thing is that my tutor liked it - trust me he is really hard to please sometimes - and he gave me 9.5/10.