My plans for 2009

I'm going to be mostly on maternity leave until early in the summer of 2009 although I will be doing a few workshops and teaching animation at Anglia Ruskin University for one day a week next semester. In July and August I'll be going to Vienna with the whole family to take up the residency that I was awarded as a prize at the Tricky Women Film Festival in 2008. I can't wait. it's not just the buns and some European travel but having some time to make work is a wonderful prize.

Mentoring

One of my favourite jobs last year was mentoring two out of the three animators who were making their animated films with a bursary from The Film and Video Workshop.
Elle Farnham made The Grand Pier an animation made using a spare rotoscope technique depicting the beach and Grand Pier at Weston Super Mare. Elle's film made it to the last 12 of the Depict competition and I'm sure it will visit many festivals next year.

Michaela Nettell is just finishing her film Under Skies, which is made up of very beautiful sequences of animated stills of Victoria Park re-filmed through glass and by mirrors, I'm looking forward to seeing the finished work.

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Croatia

I was really pleased to be invited to show the drawings from Sawney Beane in the exhibition To The (Very) Last Drawing curated by Vanja Hraste. The show is on until 17th February 2009.


Here is a picture taken by Vanja herself.

It took me a long time to find the drawings to send to Croatia, not only is my Spellbound archiving system flawed but I'd forgotten that the drawings were really small (10cm x 8cm) compared to The Emperor and The Witches (approx 60cm X 40cm) so they were squirrelled into a smaller box. I can't remember why I chose to work so small, I was using charcoal instead of watercolour, so perhaps I didn't need so much space to make the images, I was also working in Montreal, so maybe I was being economical too. There are only 15 good drawings from the film, which is 10'38". This is because my technique just leaves one drawing per shot, instead of one per frame and after one particularly busy scene featuring King James I's army, there is just a scruffy mess left behind.

There's a baby on my desk.

I'm happily sharing my animation studio with Poppy. She arrived in October at the same time as a damp patch under the floor. Once the builders had gone it seemed like a good time to tidy up and instigate a temporary change of use, although as you can see, she's not left much room for me and my watercolours, move over Poppy!