Nikita Diakur

Ugly Sims

The talk will focus on the process and development of ideas leading to a crude and intuitive approach to story, design, and animation. Animation in Ugly is a combination of puppeteering and computer simulation and varies between physically accurate and broken. Animating like this feels closer to real-life filmmaking: Like an actor, the computer follows the action set by the animator and produces results that are organic, unpredictable and personal.

Nikita Diakur, born in Moscow, graduated in MA Animation at the Royal College of Art in London and is now working as an independent director and producer in Germany. His most distinguished projects “Ugly” and “Fest” have received multiple awards and screened at film festivals around the world. Diakur has given talks at conferences such as Playgrounds, Pictoplasma and FMX; lectured at Art Academies in Berlin, Weimar, and Vienna; and recently undertook residencies at Q21 and the Open Workshop. Since 2017, Diakur is a member of the European Film Academy.