Because it was there...

Once you are out of your artistic comfort zone, and no-one is crying, might as well try some other previously unused (by yourself) and hard-to-imagine-what-you-can-do-with-it technique. A tutor in my first year at artschool told me "you can change the story but you can't change the handwriting". We-e-ell Chris, actually you can if you work hard. If you decide to accept the challenge of doing a "simple clear instructional" animation style - just in case you really wanted to apply for some of those commissions - just to see you can - just because it was there. And quite quickly you realise you have to make the style your own, and it doesn't look much like the "inspiration/ source" materials that they have posted online because - well, that's someone else's work, ideas, style...handwriting. And because copying someone else's work is really boring.
(I mean, if that's what they want, why don't they find out who animated it and get them to do the commission? is that too simple? What about original ideas? What about being different because you are actually trying to compete with those sources so maybe an alternative approach rather than glorified plagiarism might be more exciting to your audience. Or maybe not. maybe your audience wants what everyone else has, in the same way everyone else has it? You see, I'd be rubbish at marketing...)
And then this interesting thing happens where if you take out all the autographic marks, the scribbly, gestural doodads, it becomes all about the colour. And you realise there is a very good reason why you normally work in black and white or limited colour palettes, because you're not very good at colour. I mean, I love colour! I love clashing red and purple clothes, rich mixtures of orange and red, I love the blue of bluebells and the contrast of purple and yellow in an iris. But without the marks, the textures, everything looks like it was cut out of sticky paper in a nursery classroom. And trying to use every crayon in the tin is fine when you are 7, but suddenly becomes painfully difficult and inappropriate when you are trying to be a mature artist. <Guffaw. Mature!>
Well then -  another day, another chance to learn something new, develop a new skill, face another challenge. Another chance to fail and a chance to be proud of succeeding. Another way to be a human.

Pencil tests

It has been said - by those who know me - that I favour the bull in china shop approach to experimentation - just barging in, bellowing with joy and occasionally going "wow! nice soup plates". It has also been said , not entirely unfairly, that I adopt the same approach to everything else. But, having decided to make 3 versions of the same film (which became 4 after the first one was eaten by owls*) means I get to reconsider the whole thing multiple times...and that the original line-only version becomes a pencil test for the versions which follow. In a way, this is boring. Like tacking stitches I never bothered to use before stitching something on a machine. But it also means you can mess about more with the images, experiment...the hard part (arguably) of deciding the story, the length, the various scenes/ shots is done. So you can play around with the treatment, and with putting in random extra things just because. And then, a new treatment suggests different scenes/ or different focusing in on a closeup, because it is being driven by the visual, not the narrative.

Oh well, maybe the two are indivisible, but the point is you SHOULD be telling the story differently if it is in colour vs black and white. You SHOULD think about what happens to your narrative integrity when something based on an exploration of line becomes something with mass, shape, texture. How best to preserve the sense of things flowing into each other and a fine balance between a certain randomity of direction, and the suggestion of causality, of narrative. Of trying to balance the thought "why a HORSE??" with the idea that the horse is only a representation of something like life - the life-force that doesn't care who lives it so maybe I shouldn't get hung up on it either... the balance between allowing the "characters" - the line, the funny little insect things - to act out their own story with the suspicion that this may be a self-indulgent failure to take responsibility for them. You made that horse, dammit, you can't just leave it there with no narrative resolution!


Artschool used to be big on the importance and power of play. Experiment. But before we publish the results of our experiment, we need to have some idea of what we have found out, what we have learned, and what use any of this may be to someone else - which I suppose correlates to the meaning. So, does this tiny film mean anything...we-e-e-ll it "makes reference to" some ideas, perhaps even "playfully", and arguably it "questions the dominant hegemony" of something or the other so hell, yes. In non-artspeak, it features a hand with a pencil, which draws a figure, which then acquires its own pencil and draws itself a face, and then draws the world, so I'm going with "themes" of self-determination, freedom, the joy of playing and the importance of art.
Humpty Dumpty# may say it is about Glory, or Cabbage, or even the nature and existence of a God ...but we shall know how to respond to that.

*A literary reference (Mervyn Peake)
#another literary reference (Lewis Carroll)