RTS Northern Ireland

Talking to students at Belfast Metropolitan College, Diaz said: “Because we live in a very visual world, design has a key [role] in delivering our content... [and] attracting the attention of our audience.

We can also communicate our content through social media... in a visual way.”

Diaz, a native of Spain, has worked in the UK for the past decade. Good design, he said, should be “integrated in the content.... If nobody notices the design, it’s a good thing.”

Ulster University Belfast picked up the Animation Award for The Forlorn Piscator by Matthew McGuigan. A highly commended award also went to Antisocial Behaviour by Lyndsay Clarke and Phillip Steele from the Northern Regional College, Coleraine.

The Non-Scripted Award winner was The Rising of Jordan Adetunji by Joe Warden, Nathan Emery and Reece Williams from Ulster University. Isolation - Overcoming Adversity as a Community by Aodhan Roberts from the North West Regional College was highly commended in this category.

Making successful factual TV drama is fraught with difficulties. The stakes are even higher when programme-makers tackle real-life events – and no more so when they are as recent and raw as the ones depicted in the summer hit BBC One’s three-parter The Salisbury Poisonings.

Little on TV cheers up audiences more than seeing animals brought back to health, so Waddell Media’s new series Work on the Wild Side is coming to screens at just the right time.

The 20 one-hour shows will be stripped across the daytime week on Channel 4 from mid-May. They follow vets and volunteers who have given up their jobs in the UK and moved to South Africa to rescue animals, and reintroduce them to the wild.

“It’s hard to believe it’s just five years since we announced our first Northern Ireland Programme Awards, which were set up to recognise the amazing content being produced in Northern Ireland,” said RTS Northern Ireland Chair Kieran Doherty.

The first event, “Sketchy business: making it in animation”, brought together a panel hosted by the university’s Dr Helen Haswell and featured three experts from Belfast animation house JAM Media: visual effects supervisor and director Niall Mooney; animator Jessica Patterson; and animation director Simon Kelleghan. They discussed how to get your foot in the door, as well as giving practical advice, including how best to structure a show reel.

Supervising art director Paul Ghirardani – who brought one of his Emmy Awards with him – was joined by artist Daniel Blackmore and draughtsman Owen Black at the session, which was jointly hosted by Belfast Design Week.

The trio gave presentations about their roles in the art department, before the session host, Film Hub NI project manager Hugh Odling-Smee, led a panel discussion and Q&A with the 80-strong audience.

Belfast’s Titanic Studios has been the main studio and post-production facility for all eight series of Game of Thrones.

Yorkgate, which switched to digital projection five years ago, is a huge multiplex with 14 screens. The Centre saw a mix of Barco 2K-12C and Barco 4K-23B digital projectors, although as Brenden Leaden, IT manager at the cinema explained, the majority of films shown are still shot in 2K.

The Barco projectors are lamp-based with a xenon light source, suitable for screens up to 12 metres wide, and are based on Texas Instruments’ digital light processing cinema chip.