Below is a selection of renowned professionals from the animation industry who have shared their expertise with our students.

These seasoned animators have provided invaluable insights for our students over the years.

Anthony Farquhar-Smith

Anthony to visit with stories a-plenty and insights into both his work in commercial animation, and feature length stop-motion projects alongside both Wes Anderson and Tim Burton.

Merlin Crossingham

As a big friend of the course, Merlin has visited multiple times. His first visited included his experiences of working with Nick Park and Peter Lord and how it felt the first time that he was let loose with Wallace and Grommit. The lecture theatre had a buzz from the start when Merlin proudly presented not only the Wererabbit, but Wallace and Grommit themselves. Merlin gave a brief talk about his path to the top at Aardman and then went on to give some great insider tips, showing how Aardman animators develop their shots from the storyboard to the screen.

During his second visit in three years he told a packed lecture theatre with his experiences of working as a senior creative director at Aardman Animations. The room was transfixed as he absent mindedly created a Morph from a ball of plasticine as he chatted. He now sits proudly in the treasure cupboard, as does Morph...

On his third visit and again totally captivated a packed lecture theatre with his amazing experiences of working as a senior creative director at Aardman Animations on many major projects including the recent global smash, Early Man. The room was transfixed as he casually created a Morph from a ball of plasticine as he chatted to students. He now sits proudly in the treasure cupboard, as does Morph...

 

Caroline Leaf

Rightly celebrated bona fide animation legend Caroline returned with a beautiful and illuminating talk about her unique methods of production and brought with her some remarkable artefacts from her film making process including some gorgeous research drawings and hand scratched 70mm stills from her seminal cameraless film Two Sisters.

Grant Orchard

Grant is one of our best known alumni. He graduated from UCA Farnham in 1995 and is a BAFTA winning Oscar nominated director at top animation company Studio AKA. He is the creator of the incredibly successful Hey Duggie! kids tv series and he came back to chat about that and many other splendid things besides.

Peter Dodd

Character designer, art director, commercial animation guru and all round very decent chap Peter Dodd was in the big room sharing his professional insights and experience of directing the animation on the new Raymond Briggs’ feature film Ethel and Ernest.

Candy Guard

Candy is a funny lady. A very funny award winning animator, filmmaker and writer lady. She brought us hilarious tales of filmmaking, ad making, book writing and pond life and it's fair to say she asked even more questions of the audience than they did of her. She's a force of nature and we want her back soon.

Edit: we did! Candy took the 2019 Keynote Lecture and was still as wonderful.

Pete Saunders

Pete brough with him some exquisite models from some of the best puppet animation films ever produced. Mackinnon and Saunders are the master puppet makers that brought us Hollywood blockbuster animated characters that grace films such as Fantastic Mr.Fox, Corpse Bride, Mars Attacks and of course Bob the Builder...

Darren Walsh

Multi award-winning Darren Walsh returned to his old college and had the room in hysterics as he showed us some classic early work in the form of Angry Kid alongside all manner of superb and hilarious commercial work including the now legendary Meerkats series. Frightening masks were passed around along with blue rabbits, an oversize pepperami that's a bit of an animal and a small clockwork mouse that Martin Scorsese once chased around a clocktower.