International Selection Committee

Kaisa Penttilä

Animation Director
Finland



Kaisa Penttilä was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1975. It was spring. After a happy childhood and youth, 19 years later, she started studying animation in Turku School of Art and Communication, where she made her first films "Shadows in the Margarine", "The Last Apparition" and "In the Soup". All of them were presented and rewarded in several film festivals around the world. "Shadows in the Margarine" was screened in Hiroshima Animation festival in 1996.

After graduating in 1998 Kaisa has worked as a free lance animation director, illustrator, animator and teacher. Among other things. Her first film as a professional, "Air Mail" was selected in the Hiroshima festival competition in 2004 and her other films, "The Superhero's Son" and "Animation Revolution" were presented in Hiroshima Animation festival in 2008.

Her more recent film "The Egg Race" had a premiere in Berlinale in 2009 and in 2012 she completed the first six episodes of a children's TV series "Boris the Råt mends his ways" together with Leena Jaaskelainen.

In 2010 Kaisa participated in a Finnish animators'group exhibition "Anxiety-Relief". Her work was an animation installation with cross stitches. The exhibition has been presented in Tampere, Finland; Berlin, Germany and in 2012 in Tokyo, Japan.

Currently Kaisa is directing an adaptation of a children's book as well as additional episodes for "Boris the Råt". Last years she has also been teaching in Aalto University, Helsinki, as well as in Hargeisa, Somaliland.

Michaela Müller

Animation Artist
Switzerland



Michaela Müller is a Swiss animation artist, travelling between Switzerland, Zagreb and New York. She graduated with an MA in Animation and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia and holds a diploma in Art Education from the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts, Switzerland.
After working as a property master at the Lucerne Theatre in Switzerland, Michaela Müller left for Zagreb to explore the connections between paint and film. Her work is encompassing short animated films, installations and collaborations in a theatrical performance context.

Müller's acclaimed eight-minute film animation, "Miramare" (2009), made its international premiere at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, and has been shown at more than one hundred festivals since. It has won 18 awards, among them the Grand Prix of Animateka International Animation Festival in Ljubljana, the Golden Centaur for Best Debut Film at Message to Man Film Festival in St. Petersburg, and the Swiss Film Prize Quartz.

In 2012 Müller furthered her international relations as an artist in residence at Location One, New York, where she exhibited her animated installations "Transit" and "Conductivity". She is also a recipient of the Spirit Award of the Brooklyn International Film Festival.
Müller is a member of the international multimedia performance project "Trag/Trace/Spur". It was started in 2012 in co-production with the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art. The live project is combining dance movement, animated painting on glass and sound.
Michaela Müller currently works on a new paint on glass animation film.

Filmography:
“Miramare” 2009, animation paint on glass, 10 min, 35mm, Croatia/Swiss

Other paint on glass animation projects:
“Up the Stairs, Behind Doors, Out the Window” 2013, multimedia performance project, Zagreb
“Ostali Tragovi” 2013, site specific 2D animation, during Animafest, Zagreb, Croatia
“Unsettled” 2013, Lenticular Print for Obacht No. 15, Appenzell Ausserrhoden Switzerland
“Trag/Trace/Spur” 2012, multimedia performance project, Zagreb
“Transit” 2012, video installation, animation paint on glass, loop
“Conductivity” 2012, video installation with 2 projections, animation paint on glass, loop

Greg Holfeld

Director, Animator, Illustrator
Australia



Greg Holfeld was born in Saskatchewan, Canada filling long winters of his childhood with crayons, comics, and every cartoon the only television station had to offer. He self-published his comic books since primary school, but found himself studying animation at Vancouver's Emily Carr College of Art and Design. A year shy of graduation he impetuously dropped out for employment as an assistant animator and began work in studios across Canada.

In 1989, he relocated to Tokyo for a crazy-brave stab at a manga career. His work "Live Wires" was published by an arm of Sukola. However, Greg realized that Japan had plenty of much better manga-ka already and went back to animation desks in London and Sydney, eventually settling in Adelaide, animating children's television and directing commercials for local and international clients. His first professional short was the commissioned "Barflies"(1994), followed by "Heartbreak Motel" (1997), "Love Stinks" (1998), "Black & White, Red All Over" (2003), and "Get in the Car" (2003). "Tom's Toilet Triumph!" won Annecy's prize for education film in 2002.

Around 2000, Greg began illustrating children's books. Seeing a lack of comics for young readers, he found a way to get back into a loved medium.
In 2008 he created Captain Congo with author Ruth Starke and three volumes featuring the gorilla detective/adventurer have been published, the first recognized with a Picture Book of the Year nomination from the Children's Book Council of Australia. Most recently Greg and Ruth collaborated on the acclaimed "An Anzac Tale", a graphic novel retelling Australia's involvement in the WW1 Gallipoli campaign with a cast of Australian fauna.
His other major comics project is "In For The Krill", a dark tale from the realm of the emperor penguin with animation scriptwriter Jill Brett.

Greg continues to serve the world of animation, recently releasing the short film "Sumo Lake", creating a segment for Weird Al Yankovic's "Polka Face" clip, supplying storyboards for Australian television, and commencing work on his new short film "Pinchpot". He lives with his family in Adelaide, South Australia.

Valentas Aškinis

Animation Director, Animator, Producer
Lithuania

Takashi Fukumoto

Creative Producer
Japan



Born in Tokyo in 1959. After graduating from the Visual Concept Planning Department of Osaka University of Arts, Takashi Fukumoto joined the Computer Graphics Group of the Department of Technology in Osaka University to work on creating CG animation with those engineers who have developed "Links-1", the very first CG dedicated system in Japan.
In 1982, Fukumoto joined Toyo Links Corporation, the pioneering CG production company in Japan, on its establishment. Starting with making CG scenes for the theatrical animation "GOLGO 13" (1983), Fukumoto was involved in creating many films such as TV commercials, visual images for Expo, etc. As a director, he made animation shorts "Bio-Sensor" (1984) and "Peppy" (1987), as well as the 70mm ride film for Seto Ohashi Bridge Expo - "Tadano Space Port" (1988) etc.
In 1989, Fukumoto joined Polygon Pictures Inc. and worked on planning and developing their original CG characters. His works as a director include the animation short "In Search of Muscular Axis" (1990) and TV commercial "Shiseido HG Super Hard – Penguin Series " (1995-96), animation shorts "Circus Series Trilogy" (1995-96), and as a producer, he made animation shorts "Polygon Family" (1998), "the FLY BanD!"(1998) etc.
Joining Links Corporation in 1999, Fukumoto proposed the merger between CG production and motion-capture business, and established Links DigiWorks Inc. in 2000. ( served as the managing director since 2003, the representative director since 2007. In 2010, it was integrated into IMAGICA.) He produced Game Cinematics for "Onimusha" (2001) and "Resident Evil" (2002) of Capcom Corporation, an animation short "KUDAN" (2008) and many others. "KUDAN" received various awards at many animation festivals within Japan and abroad, including the "Award of Distinction" at the Ars Electronica 2008, the "Excellence Award" at the 12th Japan Media Arts Festival, and the “Best Short Film” at the Anima 2009.
Afterwards, he began planning the projects and previsualization of the movies, exploiting MR (Mixed Reality)･AR (Augmented Reality) technique, which is the real-time processing of combining CG characters and live-action footage.
In July 2014, Fukumoto joined CHEW STUDIO, and is currently planning to produce a featured animation.

Since 2000, Lecturer at the Visual Concept Planning Department of Osaka University of Arts.
Member of ASIFA-JAPAN. Member of VFX-JAPAN.