Here’s a news flash – there’s a LOT of admin involved in pulling every MIAF together.
Picking the films? A mere bagatelle; just a matter of watching 3,000 films, whittling them down to a couple of hundred that represent the big wide world of independent animation, and firing off a few thousand emails to get them locked in. An exciting blip in the otherwise packed schedule of tasks that it takes to make MIAF a whole festival and not just a figment of the festival director’s imagination.
But not all admin tasks are equal. Some are designed by the gods of event management to test the patience of a saint (the fluttery kind, not the footie players) and exercise the wisdom of Solomon. Others – a precious, joyous, utterly wonderful few – represent red-letter days that we all look forward to taking part in.
In truth, there’s probably only one that really fits that bill… it’s the process of arriving at each successive MIAF’s artwork. It’s more complicated than you might think, and at least as much fun. The process always begins in a quieter period of the year when the next MIAF is so far in the distance that all things seem possible.
The artwork is the face of the festival. It has to communicate the energy, ideas, and uniqueness of what we think MIAF represents – but it also has to be original, fresh, and step forward with a voice that is beyond ours.
The artwork will turn up large-and-in-charge on the cinema screens and tiny-but-shiny on our smallest pieces of marketing and venue decoration materials. It will beam out in vibrant colour but have to work in cooler black-and-white. It will sometimes be a great big landscape-format rectangle, but it will also be on a small vertical lanyard. Bits of it will be extracted to fill subtler backgrounds, and the most prominent character elements will be pulled out to make pictorial statements.
It has to be great AND versatile. And it has to have a heart and a soul.
Where to find somebody who can pull this off – and pull it off well? Sometime ago we realised the answer was right under our nose… where better to look than the vibrant and creative family of young Australian student animators? The passion and love of this art form that they bring to the festival becomes a wellspring of potential design as we look to annually renew MIAF’s artwork.
Thus: dateline 18 May 2025, Treasury Theatre – MIAF 2025’s Australian Student Showcase is running at full brightness and full noise to an enthusiastic packed house. Gabriella Lee Sudyatmiko’s film CARRION lights up the screen with a beautifully realised fluidity, stunning colours, and the kind of ‘other world’ transformative magic that only animation can really bring to life. And later in the festival, the judging panel chose it as Best Australian Student Film of the festival. Some stories really just write themselves.
Finding the right person is always a great start, but finding the right idea can be a bumpier path. Not this time. The first idea that ‘Gabby’ pencil-sketched for us was an instant hit. From that moment on it was just a matter of bringing it to life.
We absolutely LOVE Gabby’s artwork. It was released (as all our annual artwork is) at our International Animation Day gig in late October and from that moment on it is our face to the world – and the more we’ve used it, the more we love it.
We wanted to capture something of Gabby’s experience in making MIAF 2026 what it is so we whisked off a few questions.
“By day I work in university admin, and by night (or on my days off), I illustrate, animate, and keep my hands busy with clay crafts,” begins Gabby. “Even though I’ve been drawing all my life, I didn’t go into studying animation straight away. After high school I wanted to become a biologist (either a botanist or cell biologist), but science is VERY hard to do if you’re not good at maths, exams, or reading dry scientific papers.”
Cooool, science’s loss is animation’s gain. It’s a form of evolution when you think about it.
“After spending some time doing a Bachelor of Science/Bachelor of Art (Theatre) double degree, my Dad encouraged me to change to studying animation at RMIT and it was one of the best decisions I made. Thank you Dad!”
Trust us, not every parent encourages their kids to go into animation. Thank you Dad!
It was CARRION that initially introduced us to Gabby so we asked about the genesis of the film.
“CARRION was almost a love letter to the Gabby that could have been if they had decided to go into science instead of the arts,” says Gabby. “For those who have not seen it, it’s a 2D animated short film about a dragon sinking to the bottom of the ocean, bringing life to the barren underwater landscape. It was inspired by the phenomenon of whale falls, where whales die and their body provides food and homes to marine creatures.”
Sometimes at MIAF HQ we struggle a little to find the right ‘core idea’ for the MIAF poster but the first sketch Gabby sent us worked straight out of the box. We tend not to give artists specific briefs, so full credit goes to Gabby, and we were interested to know where that idea came from.
“I thought the prompt of creating a poster for an animation festival, along with knowing that the brief was loose and mostly up to me, was specific enough for me to get some ideas down,” is Gabby’s response. “I wanted the poster to be an ode to animation and the joys of creating, and I knew that most of the crowd coming to watch films at MIAF would be at least a little familiar with the tools used to bring drawings to life. I thought that incorporating elements specific to animation, such as a lightbox, a stop motion armature, plasticine, and a peg-bar, could be fun references to the technical aspects of creating animation.”
From that sketch we (but particularly Michael Hunt, MIAF’s Production Manager) worked back and forth with Gabby to get the perfect artwork and poster that we now have for MIAF 26. We wondered what Gabby’s recollections of the process of developing that sketch into the finished artwork were.
“There was a lot of creative freedom! I’m lucky that the kind people who run MIAF, including the volunteers who provided feedback, were pretty happy with my thumbnails on the first try. I had a few other thumbnails I proposed, but this is the one that really stuck, not only with Michael, Malcolm, and Chadai, but also with myself.”
Yep, classic understatement. It rocked our world from Day 1.
“There weren’t too many revisions needed, only one technical difficulty with one of the layer blending modes once the file was exported. Otherwise it was a pretty smooth process.”
Oh yeah, there was that day. But other than that, plain sailing.
The colours really pop – and REALLY pop on the big screen. There are some very deliberate choices in settling on how the artwork is coloured, right?
“The team at MIAF did actually have a say in what colour palette to use,” suggests Gabby with a degree of generosity that might outweigh the actual contribution from the MIAF lair. “I proposed a few based on some artwork from other artists I liked, and together we picked one that had enough contrast and variety to help provide the graphic designers with the palette needed for branding.”
“Based on my thumbnail, I knew I needed something with enough high-contrast to really boost the drama, momentum, and energy of the piece! I usually work with warmer colours, but I wanted there to be a spacey, dream-like, atmosphere to it so I chose something with more purples and blues.”
So what’s next?
“2025 was a tough year but I’m working on establishing habits that will help me find footing and happiness in the post-grad life in 2026,” says Gabby. “I have a couple of art markets lined up where I’ll be selling my hand-made trinkets, and I am determined to animate and make art more this year!”
Music to our ears – HUGE THANKS Gabby, we love the artwork and loved working with you. We truly hope you enjoy seeing it work its magic on MIAF 2026 audiences.
Gabriella “Gabby” Lee
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crushchronicles/
Website/Portfolio – https://www.gabriella-lee.com/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriella-lee-659975192/
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