Motion North, Manchester

Motion North is a creative community based in the heart of sunny Manchester, made up of motion designers, animators, filmmakers and VFX artists from across northern England who share our love of making things move.

Founded in 2009, the event has steadily grown into the place to learn from the best, attracting industry speakers from across the world.

Having held events in basement bars across Manchester, they now have a home in the iconic Band on the Wall. In February 2026, Motion North will host its largest event yet — the two-day Big’Un — at Freight Island, a venue offering three stages and additional space for attendees.

Maxon is proud to be a headline sponsor of Motion North 2026. Maxon will have multiple artists presenting their workflows at the event and leading a special workshop by artists as well as Senior Trainer Elly Wade. 

Featured artists include: 

Christa Jarrold | TimTim | Filipe Carvalho | Buck | Snask | Golden Wolf | Art&Graft | FormPlay | and many more

Workshops by:

TimTim
3D Type that moves - Making typography fun in Cinema 4D

Thursday 16:00 > 17:00

This workshop is all about bringing 3D typography to life, giving it energy and personality. We’ll explore a handful of animation techniques using MoGraph and inflated simulations, and I’ll share all my tricks to get that puff and squish look. We’ll also look at material transition effects using Vertex Maps and Redshift.

We’ll go through practical ways to stay in control of your letters (even when things get dynamic), along with small workflow tips that make a huge difference when you’re animating type.

Come and join for a fun, beginner-friendly session, and feel free to follow along step by step or just sit back and watch.

Elly Wade
Mastering Redshift for Motion Design

Friday 13:30 > 14:30

In this workshop, we’ll break down how to create beautiful, high-quality renders in Redshift for motion designers, including techniques to achieve better realism and more stylised renders.

We’ll start with exploring how to build soft, clean lighting, inspired by the aesthetic seen in the latest Microsoft campaigns. You’ll learn how to use light shaders and subtle techniques to add depth, contrast and style to your scenes.

From there, we’ll dive into advanced material creation, covering techniques for procedural gradients and layered materials, subsurface scattering, material and displacement blending, and building custom procedural masks for unique effects.

Finally, we’ll look at render settings and optimisation, focussing on how to balance quality and performance, especially when working with SSS, transmission and other demanding effects.

This workshop is ideal for any students, artists and motion designers who want to level up their Redshift renders.

Project files will be available to download, and we encourage you to follow along during the workshop using file ‘MasteringRedshift_StartScene’ so bring your laptops!