Many animation productions are international efforts, though the creative control often comes from studios in the US or Europe, while the studios in Asia end up performing the actual animation work. I will explore how the creative control in animation…
While the trademark thumbprint pressed into Gromit’s snout is the archetypal giveaway of British animation studio Aardman’s distinct material style, I was always more preoccupied by a splodge of jam. In several scenes of The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park, 1993),…
I have been taking photos, screenshots from my computer, printing them, re-photographing them, cropping them on my phone and reprinting them, creating assemblages that follow connections and human neural networks. In this process I take the role of a generative…
The horizon line is a key visual principle of the Western world-view, binding together histories of navigation, spatial representation, and philosophical inquiry. Ancient mariners valued the horizon as an orienting boundary between the earthly and the celestial, scanning perpendicularly across…
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…
