Han Dynasty

I'm excited to be helping young filmmakers involved in Jump Cuts make the animated part of a film about a wonderful exhibition at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge.   The Search for Immortality is beautifully put together exhibition of tomb treasures from the Han dynasty.  The most spectacular object on display is the jade suit of armour, sewn together with gold thread.  Jade was thought to protect the body from decay and corrupting demons, I think the suit would also be worn in conjunction with 9 orifice plugs though, and this caught the young people's imagination.   There were many fascinating objects and it was very enlightening.  The group are going to make a documentary film with fictional elements with Ryd Cook and Rick Harvey, and I will join them over half term to animate.  The group were so extremely sparky, I can't wait to see what they come up with.

A second patch

We have been given a second allotment in West Ham. It looks like hard work in the photograph but we are four strong adults and we got the potatoes in just in time. The plot is the greatest complement to snipping and animating, although it's hard to get there at the moment because the Olympics is in the way. I'm not grumbling.  No I'm not.

Busy bees

In the last few weeks I've been very busy doing some green screen work, the analogue way, to make a new background for the beautiful KT Tunstall.  I've made a new house out of paper, and soon she can dance in there.

Darth Vada is getting a house too.

Easter

We've been very busy doing important things. 

Now we are back.  I have dealt with the funny smell in the studio and tidied up from our Pop up Picture Palace.  I'm going to be very merry working on a project for KT Tunstall, developing a new project with Emily Tracy and finishing the year's teaching at Anglia Ruskin.

Pop up Picture Palace

Here are a few lovely pictures taken by Amy Scaife on the night.

Popcorn!

Me, Ashley and Emily

Tony Tunes on his wind up grammaphone

Our lovely audience

Dick Turpin galloping through the audience

From Wood Street Train station

There was certainly a flurry of rendering yesterday before our Pop up Picture Palace was to take place at 7.30 in the evening.  The wall was just rendered by 3pm, the film by 3.05pm.  So Emily and I even had time to do hair and make up as Ashley's wonderful schedule suggested.  Yes, we dressed up and there was popcorn, golden chairs and Tony Tunes and his wind up gramaphone.  There will be many photos of the fantastic event, but tonight I will just post a before and after picture of the wall, we went back this evening to take a few pictures from the roundabout and give out the last of our programmes.

Our pop up picture palace poster

Ashley has made us a wonderful poster for our pop up picture palace.  Even though an event is counterintuitive to me as an animator, that poster makes me excited, but then I remind myself that there is a persistent amount of digging on the event pavement, the dentist wall that we will project upon is still patchy and we have got quite a lot of animation to do still.  Would Pro Plus be the professional answer?

David Hall - 1001 TV Sets (End Piece)

All these TV's, 1001 of them, are busy transmitting analogue signals from terrestrial channels, until the moment that the signal is switched off.  I wonder if David Hall knows when that will be? He is showing the work at University of Westminster's P3 Gallery until a few hours after that moment.  What an exciting artist he continues to be, and how fitting to have him signal the end of analogue telly with this amazing, huge, noisy, hot, live floorscape.  Go along if you can.

Labrynth

I'm teaching at Anglia Ruskin again this semester on this module and this one too.  Today we watched Labrynth, 14'15", 1961, by Jan Lenica.  It's such a curious, mysterious and inventive film, and spare on the animation.  It comes from the Anthology of Polish Animated Film which I would very much recommend.

A Highly Committed Movie, 7'25", 1979 by Julian Antonisz is a cameraless film on the same Anthology, it's so so beautiful, and lively, the latter coming from the direct technique.  A female singer with a gravelly voice describes the loss of culture in a town, due to the greed of a naughty old woman and the story is complimented by wonderful characters looping grotesquely to the thumpy score.  Julian Antonisz was also an inventor, and wrote the musical soundtrack too.  What a find.

The two films slightly help to clarify my muddled mind as with three weeks to the big night, Emily and I are in the final furlong of our Wood Street Picture Palace Project, and it's time to pull the rabbit out of the hat in the studio.  Today I was snipping on the train, and tomorrow I'll be resident in our special  unit in Wood Street Indoor Market.  You can stop by if you like as long as you do some snipping too.

Poppy's family on a day trip

Brother

That's me on the left

Germs

 Germinator is the film that Emily and I made with Gayhurst Community School and it's doing really well.  It's won a prize at Animated Exeter, been screened at three festivals, and on Monday, Emily will accompany 8 of the young filmmakers to the BFI for the First Light Film awards, because Germinator is one of three films nominated in the audience award, it's really exciting. There is a special blog for the film so you might be able to see some pictures from the day there.

Picture Palace Wood Street

We spent a full day in Wood Street Indoor Market for the launch of the new shops filling the empty market units.  Emily and I have number 6 for our Picture Palace.  We had set up an OHP and a little screen for visitors to make shadowy pictures. We also projected some of our previous projects and some lovely clips of archive footage of Wood Street film studios and the Wood Street walk provided by WACC.  We wanted to find out all we could about the cinemas and film studios that used to be in Wood Street. We were quite overwhelmed by the warmth and curiosity of visitors to the market. With Ashley's help, we gave out 150 of our special leaflets, that's alot of folding! 

2 Dimensional Life of Her

Kim, Shelly and I went to see Fleur Elise Noble's 2 Dimensional Life of Her, at the Barbican.   It was exciting to enter the theatrical space which was created with paper and projection, overlooked by a filmed full-size portrait of the artist herself.  She is preoccupied with drawing and projection, but also puppets and animated figures, and it's all mixed up in this projected papery space. Each new scene or character is introduced by the artist, in projection or real life, tearing paper, or brushing the image on or off with a large broom.  It's extremely tactile, and the most engaging moment was a projected fire, burning everything to a crisp.  I couldn't stop sniffing for smoke, and the urge to run for the fire exit was overwhelming.

There is a promo video on You Tube which shows the amazing mixture of techniques that she used in her performance.  I think the piece could perhaps have been worked just as well in a gallery, because it was just 40 minutes long, and the largest part it was projected, not a live projection but recorded. I did have reservations about the tone of the work, because on the one hand and in the first half, it was a thoughtful and serious piece about drawing and the artist's materials and environment, yet part of the way through, the characters began to engage with each other in a jokey way, and she ended the piece remonstrating with them about the fire, which was funny but a bit confusing and made it feel like a sketch, or a work in progress.  Nonetheless, it was a great experience and I'd really like to see what she does next.

A Naughty Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

I made a sting for the BAA sting competition and it's online here with lots of other entries.  You can comment if you like. You might want to say 'Ugh'.

The Horniman Museum

Wood Street Inside Out

Emily and I are really pleased to have been successful in applying for the Wood Street Inside Out project with our Picture Palace proposal.  We will be setting up in No. 6 in the Wood Street Indoor Market next week and inviting people to come and visit, chat, snip and play around with light, paper and animation.
We will create a paper Pop-Up model of Wood Street, which will become the set of an animated film.  The final film will be screened at the Wood St/Vallentin Road Junction from March 31st 2012. There is a special blog, and we'll keep you posted.

Here is an image from Emily's project at CLR James Library. 'Adventures in Paper' The telling of Hansel and Gretel, made with Colvestone primary School for new Dalston Library. 2012.

On Being the Right Size

Last night I went to Miniatures, one of the Wellcome Collection's brilliant themed evenings.  Steven Connor's talk was very good, peppered with humour and interesting thoughts . He explored the different aspects of our relationship with tiny things.  We have all been tiny, and have a tiny memory of our tiny self, so it's quite complicated.  Amongst other things there's awe (See Willard Wigan's micro sculptures, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs below), affection, the desire to nuture (The Simpsons  The Genesis Tub), carelessness (The Twilight Zone Little People, part 3)  and curiosity (The Numbskulls from Beano).

He talked about the physical properties of tiny things, including their relationship to gravity, here he mentioned J.B.S Haldane's 1928 essay On Being the Right Size. I was glad to find the text online, it's great.

Upstairs in Medicine Man there were some lovely Bonsai trees from Kew on display.

In Medicine Now there was a flea and talented small insect room curated by Pestival.  Percy Smith's The Acrobatic Fly from 1910 was accompanied by a gentleman on the piano keyboard.   There were 3 performances by a flea circus, which was very funny, I don't think that there were any fleas, but lots of flames and imaginative suggestion instead. 

A little table top displayed some Mexican dressed fleas or Pulgas Vestidas, from the Natural History Museum.  I've seen the little couple in Tring (below).  What a thought-provoking evening.

Happy New Year

We've been on a lovely family tour of the beauty spots of the South of England, but now it's time to use my new watercolours and my new scissors in the studio..

 

Home again and riding around the bumps (upside down).

Digitalis

Animate Projects Digitalis strand was celebrated at BFI Southbank with a screening and discussion.  I made some discreet analogue impressions on my knee whilst the discussion was taking place.

Here is Gary Thomas asking some penetrating questions of Max Hattler (directly below) and James Lowne (at the bottom).  Max Hattler dosn't look like this.

The fourth panellist was Emma Geliot, who I couldn't quite see. (I bet she's glad!)

The screening was of films conceived for an online exhibition or platform, and to be obtuse straight away, it was a relief to see the films in the cinema.  My commitment to animated short film is considerable and attention span OK, but I hadn't been inclined to see them through to the end when I saw them online.  I think Max Hattler is on top of all this.  His films 1923 aka Heaven (1'49") and 1925 aka Hell (1'36") can be joined half way through and seen on a loop, this is perhaps because his reference points are not filmic, but musical, and the 'digital' is responsible for bringing him to make short films.  His films were mesmerising, though aka Hell was a little bit like being swallowed by one of the x-men.

 James Lowne is a filmmaker who uses 3D technology to enjoy the act of fabricating personas and  menacing situations for them to inhabit.  They are roughly hewn, and have tics and imperfections.  His inspiration springs from fashion photography and advertising, he also had lots of sensible thoughts to add to the discussion.

The discussion around the 'digital' focused on two issues, which Emma Geliot articulated well. That of digital platforms; the ability for artists to show their work to the millions worldwide on the internet, whether it be for promotion, or like Max Hattler, putting the whole lot online and it not having done any harm to his profile, and then the ability to create work in a cheap and easy way from the bedroom.

All the works screened were created by digital means to a greater or lesser degree for a digital platform, and they were all good films, but I wasn't convinced that the digital tools are being used with proper thought, or to their full potential yet.  Maybe it's a quiet revolution, or perhaps the definition of work as 'digital' is creating false expectations.

The Animals and Children took to the Streets

1927  are performing their new show The Animals and Children Took to the Streets at the Cottesloe Theatre.  Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt combine the excitement of live performance with the magic of animation so beautifully that the audience were chuckling with delight throughout, (especially the one's who got Granny's Gumdrops in green and white stripey bags). The show was 70 minutes long, and comprised of so many witty moments and clever references, both contemporary and all the way back to 1927. There were cockroaches scuttling up drainpipes and little puffs of animated dust in response to live action brooms, and the animated elevator took us to all the floors of the Bayou Mansions.  The performers were really engaging and so musical.  In short, it was really good.  I did have a small reservation with the structure which I can't quite articulate. I tried to imagine what's at the centre of it, without all the magic mentioned above, and I can't see a strong idea there, which is maybe what was missing.  Nonetheless, I urge you all to go (if you can get a ticket) and keep a close eye on 1927.