Living Lines 2017

Every year we suggest a theme to help you plan your Big Draw Festival event and get those creative cogs churning... We're delighted to officially announce the theme for 2017's Big Draw Festival: Living Lines!

Open to a wide range of interprepations, this year's Big Draw Festival is designed to get your marks moving! Whether you decide to get animated, theatrical, illusionary, technical or messy we can't wait to see what you have up your sleeves...

Registrations open for this years Festival on 21 February 2017 and remain open until October 2017. Sign up to Big Draw Big News for a nudge once registrations are open. Find out more on how to get involved here. Plus, new perks for organisers in 2017, including a new Festival People's Choice Award of £500 to accompany our 7 panel selected Big Draw Awards worth up to £750 each.

The Big Draw Festival 2017: Living Lines | Worldwide | 1 - 31 October

#livinglines #thebigdraw

Living Lines 2017: An Animated Big Draw Festival

For as long as we’ve been able to draw we’ve been depicting motion. The Chavet Cave in France contains drawings made some 30,000 years ago illustrating bison charging in a herd, an effect achieved by layering images - not that far removed from how we still do it today!

Remember, it’s not all screens and pixels…

Love getting hands on and messy? You remember Morph, The Clangers, Button Moon? (No? We’re showing our age...) They were all handmade characters made from clay, a bit of knitted puppetry and recycled materials, brought to life with stop-motion animation. This simple but highly effective hole-punched flip book by artist Scott Blake is also a great example of mark making on the move...

Find inspiration and get started!

So, whether you want to get theatrical, technical, messy or all of the above we want to see those lines twitching. Check out a selection of past Big Draw Festivals featuring everything from light illusions to animated Big Draw community films by the keeper's of modern animation: The Walt Disney Family Museum to Eastbury School's collaborative Rotoscope animation built from a classroom of dancing drawn students, which won them a £1000 Big Draw Award in 2015. Click here for our Living Lines inspired YouTube playlist.

A library of Big Draw Festival case studies, event resources, marketing downloads, eligibility for awards and a bespoke welcome pack are exclusively available to registered organisers of The Big Draw Festival 2017.

REGISTRATIONS ARE NOW OPEN!

There are hundreds of ways to get your marks moving for #LivingLines2017!

From the theatrics and illusions of the early Magic Lantern to Zoetropes, Thaumatropes, shadow puppets and the humble Flip-Book, right through to stop-motion and the digital technology at the cutting edge of today's computer game and film industries, to the satirical GIF memes that fill our social media feeds.

_{A very potted history of moving image!}

PSSSSST – Don't forget to think BIG

Remember, videos and GIFs have shown to encourage much higher engagement online with campaigns. Why not embrace this year's Big Draw Festival to produce a new promotional video or cartoon for your organisation? Or invite your visitors to be part of a Big Community Big Draw which everyone can be part of frame by frame!