Out of the trees and into The Forest – a consideration of live action and animation

This is a highly personal consideration of my role and identity as a film-maker delivered at the Holland Animation Film Festival in Utrecht 2010, focusing on some of the formative influences I drew from ‘live action’ film, and took in my long-established practice as an animator and animation film-maker. Both the philosophic and technical understanding of the work of, among others, Ingmar Bergman enabled me to both think about and engage with animation in a hopefully distinctive way, an approach that I wanted then to readapt back into my own live-action feature, The Forest, and a reworking of one of my earlier animated films, Crime and Punishment. This highlighted the particular place of the animator in the process and the degrees of control and choice in creating specific kinds of imagery, and the ways that it was possible to transfer life, motion and thought between forms.