When my co-author, Max Sexton, and I started researching and writing our recently published book Adapting Science Fiction To Television: Small Screen, Expanded Universe (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) we kept returning to a central concept: medium specificity. The…
Animating Industry
Sounding out the industry: the animated return of the Multiple Language Version (MLV)
by Christopher Holliday • July 7, 2015 • 9 Comments
Official stories of European film history evaluate multiple-language versions (MLVs) as a failed experiment within the emergent period of early sound cinema. As a counterpoint to intertitles that otherwise afforded readily flexible language transfer across nations, multilingual film production was…
Animation Archives
At the Archive: Access, Preservation and Discoveries
by Cindy Keefer • June 30, 2015 • 2 Comments
The Center for Visual Music (CVM), a nonprofit archive based in Los Angeles dedicated to visual music and experimental animation, has extensive mixed media animation collections. Its largest collections are the films of Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson, plus Fischinger’s…
Animation Archives
Animation Archives: Process and Materiality
by Mette Peters • June 22, 2015 • 0 Comments
The animation process often combines film and fine arts practices, whether for experimental or commercial production. Animation filmmakers make use of commercially available artist supplies (paints, inks, brushes, pencils) and specific equipment (pegbars or drawing tables), but also more unconventional…
Animation Archives
Wiki Archive Fever
by Kirsten Moana Thompson • June 11, 2015 • 2 Comments
With the archival turn in film and media studies and the increasingly diverse range of archives private, hybrid or institutional that exist both on and off line, animation scholars are confronted again with a longstanding problem. How do we find…
Animation Archives
Making animation archives more accessible – collaboration with archivists, academics and practitioners
by Rebekah Taylor • June 2, 2015 • 0 Comments
How can archivists, academics and practitioners collaborate to promote and make animation archives easily accessible through workshops, cataloguing, and displaying data? Knowledge is vital in terms of looking after vulnerable media, communicating on what material should be kept for permanent…
"National" Animation, Experimental Animation
What is animation in Ukrainian contemporary art?
by Viktoria Perevoznikova • May 7, 2015 • 2 Comments
In the article we will talk about animation as part of art practices of the day. At the Ukrainian art scene animation often, not pointedly, not bluntly, but indirectly is found in works of art, it comes in the spotlight…
Education in/and Animation
Disney Animated Features and Engaging Middle Grade Learners
by Eleanor Huntington • April 19, 2015 • 3 Comments
Teaching middle school girls, particularly middle school girls of color, about the legacy of imperialism can be simultaneously disturbing and disheartening. Learning about imperialism requires revisiting the legacy of cultural dominance with a group of young people who are still…
Education in/and Animation, Experimental Animation
Continuing the Legacy of Innovation
by Pamela Turner • April 7, 2015 • 0 Comments
It is fitting that early animation technologies, such as the zoetrope and thaumatrope were called “optical toys”. This attitude of play and discovery is inherent in the animation process, and especially in experimental work. Experimental animators approach animation from a…
Experimental Animation
Illusions of Depth and Motion in Robert Breer’s Fuji (1974)
by Paul Taberham • April 7, 2015 • 4 Comments
Robert Breer commented on one of his creative goals, by stating “I think even in painting the clue to what I do has something to do with ambiguity and controlling ambiguity and making it dramatic […] to get ambiguity as…