Rosanna Verdon-Roe Bristol, United Kingdom

Let’s get straight to the nitty-gritty! I am a hardworking extrovert with a love for collaborating, animation, brainstorming, spreadsheets (I know right- what a nerd) and creating engaging immersive experiences that will blow the socks off an audience! Besides making a cracking cup of tea, I pride myself on marrying my abilities to conjure up invigorating ideas with flair and applying them with killer time management skills.

I'm looking to work on a plethora of projects!

Want my backstory?

In June, I graduated UWE doing my Master’s degree in Animation. During the past year, I have simultaneously project managed, produced, directed and written for several animated films. These films have been selected for multiple film festivals as well as having received Finalist Awards and Honourable mentions. The Graduate Film I am most proud of project managing was “NAKED CAME THE STRANGER”. The film is an animator's rendition of the game 'Exquisite Corpse’ (Link below). I came up with this idea after conducting some self-directed research and found a new opportunity to develop the UWE Animation Course student experience. I noticed that students from across the years wanted to work on other people graduate films however were either weren’t sure how to approach their peers or didn’t have enough time to fully commit. I came up with the idea to create a "low-input, high reward" project, and led the end-to-end creation of the entire film. How it works is that each animator was given a beginning and an end picture to connect and turn into a scene. The twist is their end picture is the next person 's beginning! So when all the scenes are strung together it makes a fluid film with a daisy-chain plot. From this experience, I was able to create my own pseudo-work environment, where I managed a team of 27 animators whilst they enjoyed the perks of; creative freedom within concrete boundaries, a platform to playfully experiment and the opportunity to collaborate and network with other peers from diffrent year groups. The outcome of this film has been unprecedented! So far it has been selected for 11 Film Festivals & received 4 Finalist Awards. This project has inspired the younger years on the UWE Animation courses and is now set to become an annual project.

During Covid, I worked as a Games Master for an Escape Room company with both VR and physical rooms. I found that escape rooms can be limiting as they can only be played once, this led me to experiment and design new methods of interactive narration which could allow for someone to play the same room multiple times yet with different outcomes based on their choices. I am acutely interested in creating engaging immersive experiences which cater to different audience demographics. The main skills I developed from this were being an ambassador for a company, communicating and interacting with an audience, problem-solving, and quick thinking! I believe these are transferable skills, from; being able to visualise the consequence of each action, as well as being able to subtly get a team back on track without breaking their immersive experience.

Before Covid, I did my Bachelor's degree at The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama studying Design for Performance with a focus on Set and Costume Design but specialising in Character design. I have had experience handling budgets for both scenic and costume departments. I worked on all sorts of productions from modernised Shakespeare to operas to puppetry performances. During this time I developed soft skills such as time management, communicating and negotiating with a broad range of collaborators and making a cohesive world that supports and enhances the storytelling.