May 14, 2026
If you work with motion, animation, or graphic design, or you just love watching how visual ideas are made, 2026’s calendar is looking pretty lively. Below are the events that I’d actually recommend checking out: the festivals, screenings, and niche gatherings where you’ll learn something useful and meet the kinds of people who hire, collaborate, or push a project to the next level.
InMotion London
In Motion is the one you don’t want to miss if motion design is your thing. It’s a two‑day mashup of studio talks, showreels, and breakdowns that really dig into how projects get made. Expect nerdy production detail side‑by‑side with creative inspiration. People showing the problems they hit and how they solved them, which is way more valuable than polished case studies. If you’re working on a reel or hunting for fresh approaches to storytelling, this is the place to see both craft and context in action.
I’ve also heard their after party is the place to be!!
MO:DE Festival
MO:DE is squarely for motion practitioners. Short, sharp talks and workshops with real takeaways. It’s less about spectacle and more about craft: new tool workflows, compositing tricks, and ways of thinking about motion that you can steal for client work. If you want an efficient hit of technique and conversation without the fluff, MO:DE fits that bill.
MO:DE began with a simple belief: when grassroots creativity meets industry leaders, the whole field moves forward.
London International Animation Festival
LIAF is a different flavour, more film‑festival than trade show, and it’s brilliant for anyone who cares about storytelling and aesthetics. You’ll find shorts and features that push creative and sound design, and that kind of experimental work tends to bleed back into commercial practice (in good ways). It’s the kind of place to let your brain be inspired by technique and narrative choices you wouldn’t normally see in industry reels.
London International Animation Festival
Motion North
Not everything interesting happens in London. Groups like Motion North (and other regional meetups) keep the scene bubbling outside of the capital. Local screenings, studio nights, and meetups where you can actually talk shop with people nearby. These are where collaborations and freelance gigs often start, and they’re way easier to get to on a weeknight than a big festival in the city.
London Design Festival
London Design Festival also deserves a mention here. While it’s broader than motion alone, its programme brings together product, spatial and graphic designers in a way that’s hugely relevant to anyone thinking about motion in physical or branded spaces. The festival programs installations, talks and collaborations across the city, and its focus on how objects and environments are designed means motion designers can pick up ideas about scale, interaction and narrative that translate directly into kinetic identity and experiential projects.
If the aim is to expand how motion sits within a client’s wider brand or space, the festival is a useful place to look for cross-disciplinary inspiration.
How the scene is trending
Across these events, you’ll see a few clear threads: real‑time engines creeping into traditional pipelines, hybrid 2D/3D workflows becoming normal, and designers paying more attention to kinetic identity, how brands move, not just how they look. There’s also a steady exchange between experimental animation and commercial work: ideas get tested in small festival runs and, if they stick, they show up in bigger campaigns later on.
These gatherings aren’t just about seeing pretty work. They’re where people swap practical know‑how, the tiny process hacks, the tooling shortcuts, the approaches to brief interpretation, that actually change how projects are made. They’re also where you meet collaborators, find studio contacts and spot trends before they’re everywhere.