The unveiling of MIAF’s annual artwork is always one of the highlights of the entire festival cycle. From a public perspective it tends to be the first thing that pops up heralding the countdown to the next festival. It’s a different story inside the machine where elements of successive MIAF’s can be years in the making, including the creation of the artwork itself. As many of you know, these days we stage our own mini-festival to mark International Animation Day (IAD) and that’s when we like to share the coming year’s artwork. And so it proved to be; late last year, with the digital ink barely dry on the screen we revealed the wonderful artwork that would be the face and the silent loud voice of the 2025 Melbourne International Animation Festival.
There’s more to coming up with the artwork than meets the eye. It has to work in all kinds of sizes, shapes and formats. It even has to work in black and white. The artwork as a whole has to be able to survive being deconstructed and rebuilt in myriad forms to suit different purposes. It has to scream animation and it has to convey all the things we believe MIAF stands for. And we have to like it!
Usually the first question is who do we ask to come up with the idea. We were asking this question back in June last year. MIAF Production Manager Michael Hunt cut to the chase when he simply noted that “Shoot Me In The Grocery Line”, the film that took out MIAF’s Best Australian Student Film in 2024, was jam packed full of the design ideas and animated energy that our artwork should have.
And with that, we found ourselves welcoming Melbourne based (but globe-trotting) Yunlin Bai into the MIAF family. Lots of emails, lots of zoom calls, lots of PS files, jpegs and scans later we found ourselves proudly launching our 2025 artwork. The dynamic flying girl that adorns the MIAF website and which will soon be on your lanyards, splashing across the screens and turning up everywhere MIAF wants to be.
MIAF Director Malcolm Turner sat down with Yunlin (Yun to us!) to talk to her about her connection to animation, her broader creative practice and how the MIAF 25 artwork came together.
It turns out that Yun is currently most focused on her burgeoning career as a ceramicist. This sits beside her skills as an illustrator and freelance animator. The common threads that she hopes run through all of her work are inspirations drawn from nature and creations that provoke feelings of comfort and belonging in those who encounter them.
She grew up immersed in a world of animation, especially loving the work produced by the likes of Disney Pixar and Studio Ghibli. Enrolling in RMIT gave her an opportunity to stretch her creative skills across a number of fields but it was animation that drew her attention time and time again.
“At uni I was lucky enough to work on some very cool music video projects,” she says. “Real bands and real clients. I realised some people are actually going to watch my animation. So that became my main focus; my favourite thing to work on”.
Indeed, her graduate film “Shoot Me In The Grocery Line” made with her partner Tori Huynh was a music video unlike any we had seen for a good long while and it went straight into the 2024 MIAF line-up – and took out the main student prize.
It’s a form of animating she loves. “It would be great to be able to just make cool music videos all of my career and call it a day, but I think more practically I’m super keen to do some effects animation or background art and design with a Melbourne studio”.
When we first contacted Yun we asked her to ‘throw a few ideas at us’ to get the ball rolling. One – even in its rough sketch state – stood out immediately and that was the one we all knuckled down and developed. It was an easy choice for us and even Yun thought it ticked all the boxes.
“This specific idea came from lots of things I associate animation with in general,” she says. “I was thinking about things like movement, fun, freedom”.
But even then our unique (and uniquely loose) brief gave her reason to rethink some of her strategies for developing the artwork. “I tend to have a tendency to lean on pretty symmetrical compositions so with the thumbnail I initially made for this design I was trying really hard to break that habit because for me animation is something quite dynamic and because it is a promotional image I wanted it to be attention grabbing as well”.
That original thumbnail grew into a series of more detailed (although still relatively ‘rough’) black and white sketches. Most of the developmental issues were not so much about the central character but more about the other elements that would adorn and fill the design out as well as the frame the character would be simultaneously surrounded by and be bursting out of.
Once those issues were finalised the next challenge was colour.
“My process for colouring the artwork was pretty conventional,” begins Yun. “I started with the black and white thumbnail to try and get some of the tonal values right. Then using that thumbnail as a base, I tried about five different colour combinations. And I knew I wanted the background to be dark and to give the whole piece that strong contrast. So that meant most of the work went into deciding on the colours of the main character and the most obvious visual assets.
“I wanted those colours to be vibrant and have a complimentary colour palette so I tried some different combinations of warm colours against some darker background colours and I sent those early tests to you guys and through that wound up with the main colours we wound up using such as the orange and the blue and then I improvised some of the extras such as the bright green pen she is holding and the colourful swirls and the smoke”.
She’s describing something that took close to a couple of months but she nailed it.
Here at MIAF HQ we’ve had a little bit of time ‘to get to know’ the artwork and we’re all still finding little things in it that we love and that surprise us. All of those little features all had to be created and put there by Yun and we wondered if she had some favourites. Turns out…
“Probably my favourite little detail is the running theme of film frames in the piece – all of those frames in the filmstrips that are swirling around the character. But I also really like the white border around it which I’ve used to try and make the whole composition pop and make it look like the character and the artwork are bursting out of the screen or the page almost”.
With her artwork destined to be spread right across the MIAF. From small lanyards to full cinema screen shots, Yun is most looking forward to seeing it on MIAF’s T-shirts.
“Graphic designs have always been a wardrobe staple for me so if I get one it’ll go up on my wall”. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you get a couple Yun.
But at the end of the day Yun (and we) know that ultimately this fabulous piece of artwork is a working girl and has to go out and spread the MIAF message. In a world saturated with images and demands on our attention Yun knew the artwork had just that briefest of moments to draw people in and all the things that she loves about animation sit somewhere in that artwork just waiting to burst out.
“I’d love people to think that animation is fun,” offers Yun when we ask her what she hopes people will take from the artwork in the first, brief instant in which they encounter it. “My favourite thing about animation is that it is so free as a medium – you can make literally anything that you can dream of. You’re really only bound by your imagination so hopefully that whole ’animation-is-fun‘ message will make people check out some cool animation”.
Luckily that’s exactly what MIAF is working to front-load into the festival this year – as we always do. We are looking forward to the whole animation celebration that will be MIAF 2025.
You can see more of Yun online.
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