Electric storm Electric Avenue

Last night there was a dramatic storm in Vienna, it arrived very quickly and there was a lot of rain, it's cleared the air thanks goodness.

Red Riding Hood

I've been animating on the theme of Red Riding Hood and wood cutters, whilst simultaneously listening to this excerpt of Lady Chatterly's Lover read by a freshly showered Dominic West from The Wire. It's very Carte Noire and I feel a bit sheepish for being gullible enough to listen all the way to the end. The Katharine Mansfield story is better.

Woolly but not woolly

There's a great new DVD of Vera Neubauer's work published by Tricky Women. It gives a proper overview of her amazing animated work, which is often made of wool but isn't woolly in the least. The films which span thirty years, are full of subversive surprises and passionate moments, including a truly beautiful fierce and woolly embrace between Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. Her animate! film Hooked documents her journey through Latin America, knitting and finding women who knit and crochet and also looking for a little doll. It sounded to me like a strange quest, but in Vera's hands it makes a very compelling ten minute film. I've still got two films to watch so I might add some more to this post later (but then again it's awfully hot..)

My experiments

I'm still drawing foxes and now some crows and hens have joined in. I'm warming up slowly, I'm experimenting with the traces that are left behind, I've even been trying out some animated pans and zooms.
Oh yes.

Animators in Wien

On balmy friday night I went out for a drink to Top Kino with Maya and Daniel Suljic, a talented animator who lives here in Vienna. It was really nice to talk about the animation, paper, ink, and festivals. Daniel uses oil on glass and also improvises within his shots, for his film The Cake he even worked with another animator, taking half the shot each, which is a uniquely dynamic way of working, especially since his characters in that film are often in conflict. Fantastic stuff.

MAK

My pact worked, because it was so rainy we spent the day in the Museum for Applied Arts, it was full of treasure and we had a good lunch too.

...Bathed in sweat, Elizabeth awoke. In desperation she cried aloud: "I must be cool in Vienna tomorrow, even if the devil makes me!""














I've sold my soul and at last there's some sweet relief from the heat.
(sorry English guys in the pissing rain)

Old friends

I've put the lucky bathroom tile to one side and I'm doing some experiments with somerset satin and watercolours. The Old Man was just blue ink and so it's good to be back to full colour.

St Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna

...Bathed in sweat, the knight awoke. In desperation he cried aloud: "I must be in Vienna tomorrow, even if the devil takes me!"
Instantly the Evil One, astride a feathered mount, appeared and spoke: "This rooster will carry us to Vienna, but in return I must have your soul!"













(I'm not sure that a rooster would be able to fly all the way from Constantinople to Vienna?)

Family life and work

I've been lucky enough to have had a few residencies before but never with a family. I would argue that it's more productive to have the whole family here than not, because pining and moping takes up a whole lot of time. We usually use the day for exploring and then it's bed at 6.30 (we have to work hard to block out the balmy evening and the sound of Austrian children having fun outside) a large coffee and we get on with some work at either end of the very long studio. Last night I managed to animate ten whole seconds, they were slightly sloppy whole seconds but if it moves I'm counting it. I hav'nt exactly nailed down an idea yet, so my tactic is to keep my squirrel hair brush busy and something will come along. Anyone else employ this method?

All around in my city

I was on my own with the children for a few days, we were merrily occupied playing Top Gear Top Trumps, going to the swings and seeing how many kugels of ice cream we could order to go on one cornetto. We bought a new book for the evenings Rundherum in meiner Stadt by Ali Mitgutsch from 1968, which is splendid because it depicts scenes of children playing in snow and parks and in the street but also (without being sinister) shows people fighting, being angry, drinking and being lecherous too. Although obviously to a lesser degree!


















I wonder if Hazel has got this one?

Cardinal and Nun

Yesterday we saw an exhibition of Egon Schiele's work at the Leopold Museum. This Cardinal and Nun enjoying an illicit moment was so startling: the pyramid of red and their praying hands and the nun being so like the background. I confess I havn't even thought once about Schiele since my A levels, which is a long time ago and which is lazy.

A lucky meeting

This afternoon the air was full of thunder and it was wet, so instead of walking around slowly I sprinted and even jumped over a few puddles. Coming back through Electric Avenue in the Quartier 21 I saw a small installation. Lots of little drawings and a monitor. It was a very beautiful animation by Maya Yonesho called Daumenreise, I think it was number 6: Kyoto Mix. She had made plenty of small drawings which were filmed one by one in the centre of the frame of a journey from a to b or east to west. Just as I was leaving I noticed that she was sitting there near the work, so I was able to talk to her. She showed me some of the highlights of her Vienna Daumenreise and I shall make it my business to seek some of them out, especially the cake with lots of layers including chocolate and cherry. Maya is also here until August so I look forward to chatting again.

Revving up

My watercolours have been dusty for almost ten months, so I have a job getting my animating brain and arm working again. I've been trying to draw anything that I can see, george and poppy, trams, half waffles (see below), buildings, other people on their way and anything I can think of: wild boars, foxes, dead people.

On the exploring front we have had a helping hand from two very kind Vienna residents, and so now we know where the market is and how to enjoy a Viennese coffee. I've been to MUMOK to see a Cy Twombly exhibition, and we have visited the Danube. Here is the view out of our window, we are right in the middle of everything.

We've arrived!

Here is our very good looking home and studio in the Museusmquartier where we will be doing the artist's residency for two months (thanks to Tricky Women). It's as humid as Shanghai so we are slow as snails. Yesterday we went on a tram and had an ice cream and I did some origami.

Don's mum must be proud.

Don Hertzfeldt's event took place last night and was good and it really was busy. How in sweet jesus does he do that? When I think of other really good animators I think it would be hard to fill Cinema 1 in the Curzon. I think it might be because his work shines out on the internet, he has a very clear graphic style and the writing is really funny and a little bit dark, plus it works if you watch ten seconds of it, and holds up over 70 minutes too. He did say in the Q&A that he wasn't especially into people watching the films on the web and it's well-known that he works on film because he prefers to present it in a theatrical setting but I think the cinema was full of people who had got into the work online.

Anyway, one of my favourite moments in his new film I'm so proud of you, was when Bill was standing at a bus stop and a man operating a leaf blower comes by. He lingers for a long time blowing a leaf that's stuck on the pavement, and the blower is quite noisy and knowing what we know about Bill's fragile state of mind, it becomes unbearable tense but funny all at once. Don did talk about those kinds of moments in his films taking a long time to get right and eventually being down to a few frames here and there. It was evident that he really relished the making of the films and that he was doing just exactly what he wanted with his life. Hooray to that!
Here's a blurry picture:

The lights are on...

The studio is mine once more! I don't get to work in there yet but having a little space of my own brings much joy and sanity. Presently I'm gathering up my best squirrel hair brushes and bubble wrapping the lucky tile that I used in The Old, Old, Very Old Man because we are all getting ready to go to Vienna for two months to do the Tricky Women residency that the film won in 2008. It's very exciting. I'll be updating my blog from the studio there.

Thinking big - almost as big as Bill Brand's Masstransiscope

A really lovely artist called Emily Tracy lives nearby and one day we hope to make something big and splendid together. Musing on the possibilities and after a bit of to and fro and help from a friend we managed to come up with what we thought was a perfect and original concept. We would make an enormous stationary zoetrope that became animated when one travelled past on a train, we even found the perfect spot just coming out of Liverpool Street.. but then we found Bill Brand's Masstransiscope.

























It's good isn't it? Maybe Liverpool Street could still do with a Masstransiscope..

Don Hertzfeldt's Bitter Films















The extraordinarily popular Don Hertzfeldt is coming to London as part of a 20 city worldwide sold-out tour. Wow that's truly something for an animator. Wendy and I have got tickets to go to the Curzon Soho at the end of this month. I think I posted about his bitter films blog a few years ago, I really enjoy reading his lower cap musings, it seems like he's always busy on an animation day and night, infact he's only ever worked as an animator, and that is hard work. This image from his film 'rejected' always makes me laugh through my nose straight away.

Mentoring

I'm mentoring an animator/graphic artist called Magda Boreysza. She's doing her MA at the Screen Academy in Edinburgh. As you can see from her blog Fox and Comet working with her gives me a lot to think about, she publishes her own zines (Toasty Cats) with eerie, intricate but also funny drawings in them, she also illustrates, animates and is starting to think about printmaking too. I'm looking forward to seeing what she gets up to when she graduates this year.

Thoughts about Clay


















This weekend is Animate the World again at the Barbican Centre. I'm going to be leading workshops in clay, the handling and modelling of which doesn't come naturally to me, so I've been working hard to get to grips with it.
Below is 'Fun in a Bakery Shop', the first clay animation, made by Edwin S. Porter in 1902.







I've been looking at Mio Mao by Francesco Misseri which was first made in 1979 and has been revivied and continued by the Misseri Studios, it can be seen on Milkshake on Channel 5 and Youtube. I hadn't realised that Misseri also worked in paper (QuaqQuao) and sand (A.E.I.O.U) with similarly elegant results. The work is extraordinarily skilled and of course looks effortless, never becoming crumpled and jaded. This is not something that can be said about my work(!) but I can very much relate to his fluid approach to the animation which has the feel of a recording of an encounter between person and the material with nothing else remaining.



I also came across The Amazing Mr Bickford, a video for Frank Zappa by Bruce Bickford in 1987. I managed to see an excerpt and pretty amazing it looks too. I'd very much like to see more and I'll hunt around for a DVD of it. I'd like to lean towards showing films using metamorphosis, to try and provide a tiny counterpoint to the Wallace and Gromit effect.

Print Triennial in Finland

This is a sneak preview of a printmaking project that I have been working on with three other artists. All four of us work were at one time European Pepinieres printmakers- in-residence at the Jyväskylän Graffiikan Paja in Finland. Anna Ruth has organised a lovely project in which we are all starting a small edition and sending one to each artist and so on, until everyone has intervened on each print, The twelve prints will be shown for the first time at the print triennial in Jyväskylä in June 2009.













This is a butterfly print that I made on Joy Gerrard's first image. It has gone to Anna Ruth in Finland and will visit Veronique La Perriere in Canada. I wonder what it will look like when it flies home to Finland again?

Can you spot the difference?

The top photo is from yesterday and the bottom one from an earlier posting.


































Yes, Poppy has been growing bigger but also I've painted the walls. Slowly it's turning into a studio again, though we are having some fun in there first.

Mr Willett's Popular Pottery

In the Brighton and Hove museum I greatly enjoyed Mr Willett's popular pottery collection. His thesis was that "the history of a country may be traced on its homely pottery". In that he was a little bit like Henry Wellcome. Depicted in porcelain and ceramic there were domestic and public scenes of every nature. Here are just two shelves of Mr Willett's treasure - a 1700 delftware fruit dish depicting Mary II and a bone jug featuring George III and Napoleon as The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver.

Paper cinema


















Emily and I went to see King Pest & the Nightflyer by Paper Cinema at the little Angel last night. A lovely illustrator with an old-fashioned beard and an assistant, took his shoes off to present two short stories, one original, one Edgar Allan Poe.
His black ink pen drawings were presented live to a video camera which was projected on a larger screen, sometimes four drawings at once, some very close to the camera, framing and revealing others further away, the auto focus of the camera working hard and my brain too. The methods were all exposed in the music as well, Kora accompanied the story with many different instruments sitting to the right of the stage. My favourite of the two was King Pest, especially the part where two characters are walking a long way together, and everything slows down for a moment. It created a bit of punctuation in the narrative and change of pace that was perhaps missing from Nightflyer, but I still wouldn't have missed going, it was really great.
Thanks Sam for the tip off!

Paper Bag Lady















I was lucky enough to be invited to be the special guest at Paperbaglady in Brighton which is organised by Laura Seymour and Sam McCarthy of Open Book. I hadn't met Sam and Laura before but I said yes as soon as I saw their website because the gingham made me think of cake and I thought they would be good people. I was right, Poppy and I had a really good time, the event has a cabaret feel and everything is carefully thought through. I had an extremely tasty roast dinner and listened to Jane Bartholemew's first set, I liked it very much especially her song 'Ghost'. They screened six women-directed animated short films and afterwards Sam talked a little bit about the films (see picture) and explained why they had chosen them, which made the screening a bit special. They screened two of my films: The Old Man and The Emperor and I answered some questions posed by Sam. It was hard to remember the answers to questions about my practice, I've been on maternity leave for nearly six months now, but it was good to have a professional moment. Thanks to Sam and Laura, see you again one day I'm sure.

Clare Kitson at Pages of Hackney

Poppy and I went up the road to Pages of Hackney to see Clare Kitson talking about her new book 'British Animation - The Channel 4 Factor'. Pages of Hackney is a new, very lovingly-stocked independent bookshop in Clapton and the talk was only £3 with a glass of wine included. I'd certainly like to wander back that way soon. Downstairs was a small freshly painted space with a telly and 25 chairs where Clare talked about her new book while her partner held up a ring binder with some photocopies to illustrate some of the works that she spoke about. It was just about full up with a mixture of animators, a few students and some of the artists featured in the book. She summarised the remarkable role that Channel 4 played in supporting the production of animation, until the big budgets dwindled to leave just Animate! and 4mations. There was also a television on which she showed Door by David Anderson and City Paradise by Gaelle Denis.



















I was lucky enough to have a copy of the book already as my producer Kathrein won a copy from Shooting People and kindly gave it to me. I'm a Clare Kitson fan, she wrote Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator's Journey. The author confesses that her new book has a hybrid quality, she tells her angle on the story of Channel 4 animation and sandwiched in the middle are the production stories from some of Channel 4's key works (30 of them). It's interesting for nosy people like me, coming to animation just before the end of the Channel 4 funding era to hear how it all came about and to know where everyone fits in. At the film festivals I have met many of the animators mentioned but not quite appreciated their place in the history of British Animation, I'm thinking about Marjut Rimminen, Vera Neubauer and Ruth Lingford in particular. It is the nature of the text that it leaves one wondering about the future of animation here in Britain, now that Channel 4 no longer supports it to a great degree. I think those Channel 4 years have led to a degree of expectation about funding for animation that has caused many animators to shelve their prospective works. I have lately tried to tailor my practice so that I can continue without waiting for significant funding (until another golden age comes by!).

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!

Annecy


I had the chance to go to Annecy in June for a few nights, from Thursday to Sunday. It was quite overwhelming at first, the festival had been in full swing for a few days and I didn't know where to begin. Luckily I crossed over for a few hours with my NFB friend Michael Fukushima, we had a beer and chips until it rained when I found a taxi to my hotel. On friday I went to the Emil Cohl exhibition at the chateau up the hill. That was a rare and unexpected treat. I found out that Cohl was active in all parts of the theatre, had a photographic studio, wrote articles for newspapers about caricature, games and philately but that he was also interested in fishing, cycling, geneology and history as well as inventing games, tests, puzzles, anagrams and optical illusions before taking up film at the age of 50. The films were projected onto the walls in the Chateau but they were all projected at once, adjacent to each other. In my condition, I could have used a stool on wheels.

Annecy

Next week I'm going to Annecy on Thursday, so next weekend I hope to update the blog with my thoughts.

Anifest

Shelly Wain and I went to Anifest and here we are in the square where there was a screening of The Simpsons Movie.

































Shelly and I were both running workshops at Animate the World at the Barbican Centre in London on Saturday, so we arrived at the earliest opportunity on Sunday. One of the reasons that we targeted Anifest for our animation festival trip was Břetislav Pojar.
Thanks to the driver named Gerry we just arrived in time for the screening of Pojar's films and an audience with him too. It was fantastic to be in Trebon, sitting in the beautiful mint-green theatre watching the works of such a master. He came on at the end but he was just on his own, and obviously uncomfortable and dying to get away. Shelly wanted to know all about his multiplane set up and he threw some light on it, but only to say that there was a mirror involved... It was very mysterious and we are trying to find out more about that.



As you can see from my picture I'm expecting a baby at the end of the summer, so we didn't take things too fast. It went like this: full breakfast, screening, snack, screening, full lunch, screening, lie down, waffle/ice cream, little walk, supper, bed. We were only there a couple of days but we did catch a few screenings. The two films that I particularly enjoyed were KFJG no 5 by Alexey Alekseev, Hungary 2007, a really charming animation with a bear, a wolf and a rabbit in it and The Mouse Story by Benjamin B. Renner from La Poudriere, a really simple adaptation of an Aesop's fable with really great timing and characterisation. It was good to see Franz Kafka's Country Doctor by Koji Yamamura. The film has been winning alot of prizes, and I can see why, it's in a league of it's own. It's an eerie experience, very complicated and detailed, like a Paula Rego print. I'd like to have another look at it in a cinema to pick up some more of that story. He won the big prize, quite right too I think.

The British Animation Awards

I'm really pleased to be a finalist in the British Animation Awards short film category. A bit astounded too to be up there with Yours Truly by Osbert Parker and The Pearce Sisters by Luis Cook, two huge films. The award ceremony is on March 13th, it will be exciting to go to an animation party, or any party for that matter!

A hat trick or a nutmeg

The Old Man won best Independant film at BAF. Thank you very much BAF. I went for the first day of the festival and had an interesting day, I saw Paul Bush's talk and the professional and short films in competition.
Now I'm the guardian of this little fella. He has a stern look, which wont be bad for me because 2008 is going to be a year in which my studio is tidied more often.