Animation goes, in all its superficiality, deeply into the substance of being, the hidden realms, the crevices beneath usual exposure, the constructions and reconstructions. […] Film is the unknowing suspension of disbelief in stand-ins, doppelgangers, avatars, things that only pretend…
Writing about the way elements move in animation proves to be a formidable challenge for any book on the medium, but Ryan Pierson’s Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics (2019) manages to explore philosophical theories related to change while providing…
I work within a tradition of documentary practice. Whilst a documentary can follow a narrative structure, this video complicates any notion of narrative to present a section of path in a wetland forest. This is an essential watershed area where…
I have been working frame by frame for several years in both 16mm film and video. Although I do not consider myself to be an animator, I use single frame shooting to elaborate and control what are sometimes very complex…
In an effort to prove his theory on persistence of vision to a wider, non-scientific audience, Joseph Plateau developed his first phenakistiscope (1832) depicting a dancer who performs a pirouette in 16 distinct steps, each of them separated by a…
The phenomenon of persistence of vision (POV) is central to the conceptualisation and pedagogy of animation. There exists however controversy between film/animation theories and empirical science as to the parameters of this phenomenon. POV is classically seen as the phenomenon…
One of the reasons for the popularity and resilience of what is today referred to as the “persistence of vision” theory is that it mistakenly provides a simple explanation for two distinct perceptual phenomena. The first is flicker fusion, which…
In 1992, I was a recent college graduate who had moved to Los Angeles in the hopes of making a career as a screenwriter. A few happy accidents landed me work as a writer for a new series on Nickelodeon,…
French Animation History (2011) by Richard Neupert delivers an essential academic exploration of Francophone animated cinema, a topic of great interest according to Neupert, due to its artistic potential and worldwide influence since its origins. Across six chapters, the author…
While the Lumière brothers’ film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) enshrined the image of trains in film history, trains may also have played an essential role in the history of psychology and the scientific study of…
