How it works

 

How it works: this depends on who you ask

In the morning, the birds make the sun rise by their singing. “Time to get up and warm the sky, we are cold”, say the sparrows. The blackbirds argue noisily, “Not too hot, my eggs will cook”. The robin laughs.

Later, when it is warm, the trees shake their branches to make the wind, and cool the air. Out to sea, where no trees live, the water rolls over and over to make the wind. They push it towards the shore, where it meets the tree-wind, which makes the waves break. All the shorebirds run up and down, paddling in the warm water, job done for the day.

The sea is busy...it pulls the water down off the mountains, like a magician pulling flowers from his sleeve, while the waterfall holds up the cliffs so the fish can climb up. Or down.

When the water is all gone, the cows sit down in their fields to make it rain, and the sea whispers to the rain “come to me, come home”.

When the wind has cleaned the land, and the sun is tired of shining, the birds sing a lullaby and the hills open their arms to snuggle the sun down to sleep.

Then the flapping bats come in, carrying the dark like a big cloak and lay it over everything. The dark has holes in it – thousands of holes made by hundreds of biting insects, horrid wasps and evening midgies.  But the cloak is not spoiled. These are the stars, the holes that let light shine through from the other world; the world of possibilities. The daytime creatures sleep, except for the woman who shepherds the clouds across the sky. While they sleep, new possibilities drip through the holes, ready to be found in the dew on the grass; or in your dreams.

The owl calls the moon,  who may or may not come. Moons are always busy. 

Home (again), home again, dancing a jig

caddis fly contemplates the nature of home

The film of HOME is finally finished, though I doubt it is more eloquent than the blog post about it from earlier in the year! perhaps I should write more and draw less. It happened. It was fun. I found time to untangle the stupidity of simultaneously
*working on 3 films at the same time - 2 finished, one still not, 
*recreating a 4th film which was lost (when you keep thinking, but wasn't there another version of this, with woodlice in...but you can't find it and start to wonder if you only dreamt it...and then find a crappy DVD copy in the bottom drawer-under-the-bed of the hard drive and manage to extract the soundtrack to go with the 3 million bitmap images)
*writing a narrative (NARRATIVE! No more sloppy organic evolution of non-linear wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey ..oh no sorry that's a quote from Dr Who) about a woman who is also a cactus...for which idea I am indebted to a wet afternoon at a craft fair and a Joni Mitchell track, and mostly 
*running. Which has kind of taken over my life until after September 8th (Great North Run).
From now on maybe stick to one thing at a time? Oh wait, I could make an animation about running. Finally a proper use for the walk/run cycle cliche.

joining too many dots...

In between making glass doodads and mending broken stained glass window panels and building a madly ambitious glass-and-wood sculpture for the garden, and gardening... attempt ludicrously ambitious film ideas and get bogged down for days on end animating waving grasses because I saw some on the clifftops on a walk and thought what fabulous textures, and how they looked like the waves on the sea and how a boat might sail through them...and how that reminded me of an opera I saw based on Where the Wild Things Were, (the night Max wore his wolf suit and sailed out of the bedroom in a wooden dinghy)...and how I could knit a wolf suit, or maybe just a suit, in fact (pause to clear out sideboard and throw out dozens of old video tapes) I could perhaps knit one out of the videotape, (pause to contemplate recycled arts, the politics, the aesthetics, the fun factor of recycling as an art/craft mash-up)...and then thinking how that would disguise the form of the human underneath, perhaps enough to confuse the viewer as to the human's gender...and then reconnect with an older idea about wrapping a human in - something...bandages, paper and string?...so you could try to read it as a human but not as a man or woman... (and simultaneously, neither as black or white)

Miki Z modelling kitchen roll by Lidl

and finally, spending a mad but fun afternoon wrapping a friend in kitchen roll and taking photos for reference for an animation...that will have nothing whatever to do with waving grasses or boats or Rooks that suddenly take off, shouting from a fence post, buried neck-deep in meadow flowers...
and then going in to the new show at Baltic 39 and looking at a collage of a giraffe and thinking how Id like to keep it simple, no frothing textured fronds at all but blocks of joyful colour and sturdy solid lines and a suggestion of tree, grass, bird not a Samuel Palmer etching and then Oh how about a NARRATIVE in all of this and then
...breathe...
just do the drawings and stop trying to join ALL the dots. Some ideas will flow. Others will flow away - let it unfold as it will. Try not to get distracted by all the shiny toys. Try to strike a balance between what is "beautiful" and brings you "joy"/ and what is rich with meaning and brings you questions. And what is fun.

Start with the right story

think in images not in words...?

Another day, another film festival... and I have to say: I don't really get it...animations that aren't actually animated, but seem to be a series of images, some of which have movements in, some not; and which accompany a story being told by a narrator. I don't want to come across all purist (having made a career of doing things the wrong way) but it seems to me the point of animation is that it should do something that text and image don't - something more. That it should be not so much an image that moves, but a movement that is captured. I wonder if people make these films because getting fluid movement is really hard, especially if you are looking for naturalistic movement, or even harder.. gracefulness? Or whether maybe they are starting with a story which is too complex and subtle to work any other way. I like to find stories which will work without dialogue, where the narrative comes across in the actions and the emotions come across in the visuals, the pace, the expressive capabilities of a wobbly drawing.
There's a fine balance in trying to make animations for adults, which are visual stories but neither slapstick nor downright obscure. I don't know if I'm making that balance; but I do know I'd never make an animation tutor- I'd be telling the students "You're starting with the wrong story!"

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)

Trailers (for sale or rent)

making posters is an even more specialist skill!

A friend suggested I really should be using instagram - for videos - which means 15 second cuts: as if 1 minute wasn't enough of a challenge...
I started by trying to make a 15 second narrative (which in a couple of cases was actually possible as they had started out extremely short and with a fairly non-narrative kind of narrative) but for most of the ideas, the challenge was finding the good bits (visual) weren't necessarily the good bits of narrative. It emphasised the inseparable nature of the visuals and the narrative - which is good - but also helped with thinking about how shots or ideas could be re-ordered without unravelling the story. Some film festivals ask for trailers, and I always think...that's mad, a trailer for a 2 minute movie...but actually that is a more helpful way of looking at 15 seconds extracted from a short short. It's not about condensing the whole story... or extracting the "best" 15 seconds of visuals (because that may not tell a story, may not have pace... oh wait, how can they be the best visuals if they dont have pace? Then they are only 2 dimensional). So a better comparison/ starting point might be to look at the images I chose to extract for the screenshot web pages - a series of images which tell parts of the story but don't reveal the ending, and which are chosen for their variety as well as the strength of the images themselves, and the way they carry the narrative sense. But trying to put them together as a series of sequences rather than stills...aaaargh! Starting to really appreciate why storyboarding is a specialist skill and so is producing trailers.
UPDATE: a very useful training session from Tom Armitage, via Northern Film and Media, about creative ways to use the web to promote/ contextualise/ raise interest in/ support and reinforce your film work... I think I might actually be heading in the right direction...

TreePower

Finally  - actually quite quickly - finished the illustration for the book, although covers/ endpapers are still to be discussed tomorrow. Now that (see last post) was a good challenge and a good deal has been learned. It's useful to work in a different way sometimes, to have different constraints. They can be arbitrary (a film exactly 60 seconds long, a story without words or dialogue, a limited palette) but again, some artbitrary rules are more useful than others. When I was at artschool, systems painting was still going on - and paintings made to a decision process governed by chance (e.g. throw of a die). But I think agency is important. I make art, films, illustrations for trees, because I have something to communicate - a message, a sense, a celebration maybe even an inspiration. Without agency we cannot communicate.

The tree (in the book) is female. The other main characters are also female - which can make for a confusion of pronouns - but is an important element of the story. We (the author and I) did not discuss gender stereotypes or why and in what possible sense could an artificial christmas tree be regarded as female...because we are old friends and it felt like we didn't have to. So the story can become one about empowering girls - not to do anything in particular, but just to be free of the pink-disney princess-or-maybe-its-OK-to-be-sporty stereotype. And to say not "a girl can do anything a boy can do" but yes, a girl can do anything a child can do, including dream. I tried not to give the girlchild a pink anorak, I did. But that was what she wanted to wear. Cerise pink, to clash with her red and purple hat. A character you can believe in has to have the space to make her own decisions in your narrative...which is why you need to push those arbitrary limitations - in your animation as in your life!
UPDATE: New improved girlchild, with more hair and generally looking less like Elmer Fudd. Avoiding gender stereotypes is quite tricky when you have so little detail to play with AND when faced with the audiences default assumption that people are male...

Scripts, image sequences and videotape

Working on the scripts for the Shakespeare shorts has made me realise how much fun it is to work in a different medium. To explore telling a story through multiple perspectives but using words/ and different voices.
To find creative ways of avoiding too much lip-synching but without resorting to a disembodied narrator...through close-ups, cutaways...keeping the story visual and not letting the images become secondary to the words. I find this means the script changes as I go, as interesting visuals suggest themselves. Forgive me (colleagues) but I seldom stick to a storyboard and seldom even draw one. Its mostly back-of-the-beer-mat/ organic flow - or as we professionals call it Zen Animation!

But...I have only just realised -while updating the website - that every narrative I create is also told (differently) through a series of still images (the thumbnails) which compose a sort of trailer in comic-book form. In fact, another adaptation.
Damn. Now I've realised that, I'm going to have to start being more creative with the shape/ layout/ size of the thumbnails.
Maybe with speech bubbles...

Let Joy be Unconfined...

unlikely fish-person-hero: protagonists don't have to be heroes?
...

... Finally finished the latest animated short! An attempt to use only black and white  and to use texture without getting horribly visually confused. I made this for a particular film festival, with a theme, and have duly sent it off. & will be sending it further afield...But really of course I made it to see what would happen, to wrestle with the temptation to cut corners or suddenly use red and teal blue, and - as with most narrative work - to find out what would happen to the protagonist in the end.

...but is it art?

Malcolm ponders the nature of art & animation

Just visited my local art gallery (Biscuit Factory, Newcastle), and reflecting on animation as an art practice...(when I was studying Foundation and making choices, they didn't really have animation degrees) Interesting to see where Universities now place this study; within computing, design/illustration, journalism (?) and in Film Schools. Certainly animation covers a wide area, including storytelling/ narrative, drawing/ illustration, movement, sound, technology, communication/design. But so does Fine Art...and artist's film is well recognised as a genre/ even a section in film festival submissions... But what I'm wondering is why do there seem to be so few fine artists working in animation? (aside from the equipment, the time - which usually suggests teamwork, the difficulty of getting it shown, the lack of commercial saleability, the industry system, the un-fashionable-ness of narrative in fine art...hmm)