Directors Profile: Gerald Conn

Gerald Conn is an award winning animator and filmmaker whose films have been broadcast on national television and shown at numerous international festivals. He specialises in sand-on-glass animation and won the 1998 BAFTA Cymru Best Animation for his film The Comet’s Tale, a compelling sound and image mosaic. This example of his sand animation technique explored the myths of Halley’s Comet and how different nations responded to its rare appearances throughout history. His earlier film Eastern Promise (1996) also utilised this technique through exploring the tourist industry in India.

Gerald has taught animation for a number of years in schools and colleges and has travelled to France, India and Japan to run workshops and to talk about his work. In 1998 he was involved in setting up CINETIG, a Lottery funded animation collective who specialize in working with schools, community and special interest groups around Wales. For Cinetig Gerald co-directed the BAFTA Cymru nominated and First Light Films winner The ‘Stute (2007) and Booktown (2005), which won a Youth Work in Wales Excellence Award.

Many of his films are directly choreographed to music and he has made videos for Welsh band GORKY’S ZYGOTIC MYNCI that have been screened on MTV in the UK and abroad. His work has often dealt with different cultural perceptions of various issues, whether contrasting West Indian and British views of cricket in Just Not Cricket (2000) or looking at varying attitudes to the British seaside in Romance in the Air (2002). Gerald has just completed a pilot for a feature length adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and a Welsh Arts Council funded film concerning the relationship between the original Welsh settlers and the indigenous people in Patagonia.