22/6/2023
Generation
Last week Next Lab Generation, the benchmark workshop for the animation sector supported by Comunidad de Madrid and ICAA, among others, was presented for the third consecutive year at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival and Market. The winning projects Latente by Carlos Zaragoza and Aurora Jiménez; The Last Spitfire by Renato Roldán; LIMBO by Daniel Shambo; and the special mention All Good by Diego Porral and Joaquín Garralda, made their pitch in front of a room full of audience at Annecy MIFA, an international industry referent.
The trio of winning works received 8,000€ in development aid, three months of mentoring along with a travel grant and accreditation for a representative of the work, and the opportunity to be presented at the festival along with a special mention from the jury.
In the MIFA Pitches Digital Experiences category, Next Lab Generation 2022 winner Lumen won the Stereopsia Booster award. This digital VR experience, by Enric Sant, introduces us to a small luminous animus called Lumen. The character wakes up in a dark rocky cave full of ancient symbols and magical elements. But one day, the cave collapses and the animus struggles to get out, unaware of the adversities he will encounter along the way.
In this Annecy edition, a significant percentage of the projects selected in the different sections of the festival have been participants of Next Lab Generation. Fabiola Rosso's Nerea, another of the projects selected in the recent edition, also attended the festival as part of the "Stories for Women" section, a programme sponsored by the Walt Disney Company, with additional support from Sony Pictures Entertainment. Another of the projects present at the world's biggest animation event was Titan Tofu, a transmedia series project by María Luquero selected at Annecy 2023 in MIFA Pitches Series. After its passage through Next Lab Generation in 2021, Titan Tofu has continued its journey with milestones such as its selection in the second edition of CIMA IMPULSA.
After three editions of Next Lab Generation, almost 50 animation projects have received advice on how to introduce technologies such as VR and video game engines in the prototyping phase. The festival was a meeting point where around twenty professionals from different editions of the workshop came together. During the presentation at MIFA, Jose Luis Farias, director of Next Lab Generation, highlighted the high number of workshop participants selected for the festival. He also shared with the attendees the data from the last edition and the future of this workshop, which addresses the different challenges and opportunities offered by the incorporation of new technological tools in animation and video game production.
Next Lab Generation 2023 is sponsored by the Community of Madrid through the Council for Culture, Tourism, and Sport as a main sponsor, with financial support from the Institute for Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA), as part of the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan advanced by the European Union, the participation of the Ministry of Culture, DeAPlaneta Entertainment, and the Municipal Government of Madrid, and collaboration from Enisa, Annecy Festival and Weird Market.