See No Evil, the London event that is run by Thiago Maia and our own James Wignall will celebrate its 1 year anniversary next week with a meeting featuring Ubik and Man vs. Machine. The meeting is at 7PM Tuesday, April 13th at Kick Bar. One lucky attendee will win a brand-new copy of Adobe CS5 as well!
We’re very excited to see more community events like See No Evil that are celebrating and sharing great work in the field of Motion Design, film-making and animation, and that create a space for designers to meet up with each other outside the office. We caught up with Thiago to talk briefly about his last year running the event.
Give us a quick rundown of what See No Evil does, who’s involved and what’s your mission?
See No Evil is an bi-month event and a blog for all Animators, Designers and Directors to show and discuss our work in the UK. It is an initiative from Thiago Maia and James Wignall and our mission is to give the industry a better sense of community in London and a new place where they can find work and interesting things about our industry in UK.
Why did you want to start SNE? What was missing from the Motion Design scene in London?
As a Brazilian and a freelancer in London, I always missed that community side to meet people and especially where to look for it.
In London things are a bit more underground, a bit more difficult to get in touch with if you don’t know people. There are people from everywhere in the world and there are always people arriving and leaving the city. So, I decided to do something to help everyone and make people get together.
In the begin it was just a get together in the Pub and I used to call it “Mograph Meeting”. It used to happen once a month and I used to email just people that I knew and their friends. James Wignall came down few times and we started to talk about the “Mograph Meeting”. He said he was interested in helping me to develop the idea, so we teamed up and in March of 2009 we created the first See No Evil with the release of PSST! Pass It On 3 in London.
What has been the best thing about the last year of SNE?
The best thing of 2009 was to see the event growing, getting better and helping people in the industry.
It started just showing peoples work and now we have the best Directors in UK coming down to show and talk about their work.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned? Anything you would have done differently?
I think the big lesson is that it is really difficult to organise something like this, especially without any sponsor or help from the industry. We learnt a lot from our mistakes and we still learning. But it is worth it when you get feedback from people and see that you are helping the industry. It is great for us when we heard people saying that they got work because of See No Evil.
What plans do you have for the next year of SNE?
Our plan is to make the event grow and to be self-sufficient. To make it better and more professional for everyone, with more and more surprises.
We want to improve the website/blog to post more of the best work from the UK industry, and also to make it a better place to find work, studios and freelancers in UK, helping the industry to get together.
If we can dream high, we would love to make a big See No Evil Event next year with Directors and people from around the world. But it still a dream, because at the moment the cost of organising the events comes from our own pockets and a big event would cost a lot money! But we are dreamers and I believe that everything is possible.
Congrats, guys! Looking forward to another year. We’ll try to get over there at some point to check it out and buy a round!
UPDATE: 04/14/10 Check out SNE pics from the event here.