Amsterdam Kaboom! Festival 2019

This month, a number of my classmates and I were lucky enough to visit Amsterdam for the 2019 animation festival Kaboom! festival that was held there. Kaboom! is a festival held in the Netherlands that celebrates animation, showcasing a wide variety of animations from creators all across the world. It hosts talks and activities by a number of well know creators within the industry.

I had only been to Amsterdam once before for a few days so I was very excited to go back as it is an incredibly pretty place! I was especially excited for the trip as this would be my first time at an animation festival. The festival itself is held in Westerpark, not too far out of the main city centre of Amsterdam. Our hostel was based in Zeeburg, again, just outside the main city centre, however it was easy enough to catch a bus or tram to any of the locations used for the festival.

• As a side note, I really love the transport system in Amsterdam. You can buy daily and weekly travel cards that let you just hop on and off a bus or tram without hassle. I wish we had this sort of system here!

I thought the festival itself was amazing. Although it's apparently on a much smaller scale to the likes of Pictoplasma, I had an incredible time and saw many animations that left me feeling greatly inspired! The variety of mediums that the animations shown were created in was interesting, especially as I hadn't come across some used so effectively before.

We arrived in Amsterdam in the morning on the first day of the festival (Wednesday), so we didn't really see much of it that day as we had to get registered and were pretty tired from being up so early for the flight. We also wanted to have a wander around and get our bearings of the place and find some places to eat before heading off to see anything. Luckily, the festival handed out timetables which allowed us to plan out what we wanted to see and when over the coming days, which was super handy as there was so much that had been crammed into the schedule.

Throughout the festival, I was able to see a wide variety of work. On one day, I watched 'Focus on South Korea IV' and 'Aardman Shorts'. The Korean shorts were the most interesting that we saw at the festival, I thought. They were all about life in South Korea and about Korean culture and it was interesting to see how work by artists from that culture is different to typical western works and culture. The Aardman shorts were a very fun watching experience and it was enlightening to be able to see how the quality of their stop-motions has improved since their first. I love to see artist/animator progress like this as it makes me feel hopeful about the future and allows me to not be as harsh on myself for my journey, since I am still at the beginning of it and still learning.

I was also able to try out some virtual reality experiences. These were mostly demonstrations but were impressive all the same. Two talks I attended during the festival were 'Women Watching Porn LIVE' and a talk by Mike Hollingsworth.

Aside from the festival itself, there were a few other things we we able to do during our time in Amsterdam: we visited the Bodyworlds exhibition (very intruiging, if not a tad gross), Moco Museum of contemporary art (featuring Banksy artwork), we had a wander around the Red Light District and I tried white wine for the first time—delicious!

A fantastic trip! I would certainly love to visit both Kaboom festival and Amsterdam again in the future!