GRAPHIC festival tickets on sale Monday Sept 17 – animation competition closes Oct 28 midnight

Sydney Opera House today announced their program for the third annual GRAPHIC festival, a weekend of graphic storytelling, illustration, comics, animation and music on November 10 and 11.

Tickets go on sale to the general public:

Monday 17 September, 9am.

Insiders: Tuesday 11 September

GRAPHIC Festival subscribers: Wednesday 12 September

Click here to watch the video, visit the website and view the festival planner.

Click here to find out more about the animation competition.

A festival of firsts, GRAPHIC’s eleven performances include world exclusives, Australian premieres and specially commissioned works that celebrate and respond to visual imagination and graphic storytelling. The only festival of its kind in the world, GRAPHIC showcases these artforms to a wider audience, whilst retaining their authenticity and integrity.

GRAPHIC 2012 features new commissions from high profile international and local artists. Pixar: Behind The Screens is an exclusive look at animation studio Pixar’s stunningly successful 25 year career, presented by Pixar’s Academy Award winning director Lee Unkrich and created just for GRAPHIC. New Zealand’s Fat Freddy’s Drop will perform an exclusive, specially commissioned animated and illustrated album preview of their yet-to-be-released fourth album Blackbird, while the wildly imaginative and surrealist universe of Dr. Seuss will be paid tribute by the artists from Australian hip-hop/electronic music collective, Elefant Traks.

Other program highlights include; The Good Game: ‘Roffle Cup’ Live, a live gaming quiz show from ABC TV’s cult video game show Good Game; Creatives from the Academy Award winning animation studio Animal Logic will discuss the origin, evolution and future of computer animation; indie cartoonist and writer Peter Bagge will discuss 30 years of his darkly comic and hysterical work in Peter Bagge’s HATE! & Other Neat Stuff; while FBi Radio and GRAPHIC team up to present Radio with Pictures – one hour of storytelling which is part radio show, part comic strip, all performed live.

Says Jordan Verzar, GRAPHIC co-curator: “Curating GRAPHIC is a joy each year. We work with, and alongside, some of Australia’s and indeed the world’s most talented artists to devise new and interesting ways of showcasing their stories, various art forms and new collaborations for the stages of Sydney Opera House. Mixing up genres and art forms while exploring new avenues of storytelling in a celebration of creativity is at the heart of GRAPHIC. We are proud to have all these artists involved and creating new shows for us at this year’s GRAPHIC! “

Says Ben Marshall, GRAPHIC co-curator: “GRAPHIC is a fresh, rigorous, fun, original weekend festival about visual storytelling. Everything presented here has been created especially for (and will be performed for the first time at) this festival. When overseas, I’ve had several arts institutions say they’ve noticed its success and are watching it closely.

“It’s tremendous fun being able to use the heft of Sydney Opera House to highlight great work in mediums like animation and illustration that can produce outstanding work but fall outside the traditional arts conversation. There are a lot of ways into this year’s program and it will be an exhilarating weekend.”