Animation Practice, Process & Production - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2012

Pillow Girl was half of a two-part project demonstrating the use of digital technology to create new components for existing works. In the case of Pillow Girl this entailed the creation of a visual element to compliment an existing audio work. The projects' second part used this same process in reverse, creating a new audio component for an existing visual work (specifically, the production of a soundtrack for a silent motion picture). This article will focus on the first part of the project (Pillow Girl), the creation of a new visual component for an existing audio source.

This article reflects upon the recent intersection of two prominent figures in contemporary American culture, namely the celebrity and the animated animal. Historically, animated animals have achieved celebrity and stardom (e.g. Mickey Mouse), and, in turn, movie stars have made appearances in animated film (e.g. in Hollywood Steps Out (Tex Avery 1941)). But there is a novel convergence that occurs with the recent popularization of celebrity voice-acting in American feature animation. With celebrity voice-acting, the celebrity voice is disembodied and reassigned to an animated body, often that of an animal, and this concurrent vocal presence and physical absence allows celebrities and their animated animal counterparts to engage in a symbiotic relationship, relieving both the star and the animated animal of some aspect of their bodily confines: the star has the opportunity to dissociate his or her performance from the constant scrutiny of extratextual media representations of his or her body along with the personal fallibility implicit in those images; reciprocally, the animal character, often viewed in western traditions as a commodity or resource for consumption and ridicule, can transcend its bodily containment and linguistic impotence and participate in a social, cultural and political discourse by means of its borrowed celebrity voice.

The period between 1994 and 2004 was a unique moment in time for the TV animation community. It was a time of transition, when the introduction of digital tools caused irreversible changes to long-established 2D animation production pipelines. These new digital pipelines altered the time-honoured traditional roles of ‘old timers’ (senior artists) and ‘new comers’ (junior artists) and caused unparalleled revisions to conven¬tional production models. This article uses Lave and Wenger’s concept of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ and Basil Bernstein’s ideas on ‘trainability’ and ‘recontextualization’ to discuss the changes brought on by the introduction of digital applications to a community of practice in flux. It focuses on the Toronto animation community as a microcosm of a global experience and uses Nelvana – one of Canada’s most influential and successful animation production companies – as a case study. By means of an interpretive phenomenological approach it analyses and evaluates the crisis during this period of time and describes the animation artists passage from resenting change to directing change within their industry and community.

This article describes an emerging function for the archive within animation production and scholarship as the institution responds to new demands by incorporating creative practice. The key tension in the history of archives is between preservation and access. The first mandate is to maintain the collection. The second is to make materials available to the community the archive serves. But what is that community and how is it best served? This article demonstrates how two archives have addressed these questions, the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive and the National Film Archive of India, the first an activist archive not of animation but for animators, and the second a repository not only of artefacts but of an unbroken tradition of practice. To serve animation communities, the archive must be an available resource. This may be achieved by it becoming a place where practitioners can discover shared methods, narratives and traditions. While this means the archive cannot be an exclusively academic domain, it is an opportunity for researchers to engage in dialogue with other practitioners on the same terms to productively negotiate a common animation community.

The anamorphic cinema is a research/creation project that proposes new ways to engage with moving images by applying digital imaging and animation to catoptric anamorphosis, a perspectival technique from the seventeenth century that deforms pictures so they appear to re-form in the reflection of a curvilinear mirror. Culminating in Ghost in the Machine: The Inquest of Mary Gallagher, a looping fifteen- minute, site-specific video installation investigating the culpability of a working class woman in the 1879 murder and beheading of another, this project problematizes representation as re-presentation. Dramatic performances of witness testimonies and newspaper texts, layered with diverse archival images form a network of narratives that revise the case within a context of nineteenth-century spectatorship, visual culture and disciplinary discourses. Made for exhibition in the historic Montreal neighbourhood called Griffintown, the location where the events it depicts took place, Ghosts emplaces and embodies multi-perspectival views, encouraging mobile spectatorship and passive interaction. Audience members cannot alter the work directly but their experiences are dependent on their relative positions and angles of view. The anamorphic cinema literally re-presents partial perspective and situated knowledge, materializing theory into phenomenological practice.

Digital animation is arguably a medium that can produce any image that the human brain can imagine, but is this all that it can do? It is not without good reason that animation has become a popular and enduring medium: animators and artists have long known that certain forms of simplification and exaggeration are more pleasing than others. This article will argue that animation has the ability to not only match the human imagination, but also to improve on it via the mark-making process itself, or more accurately via the ‘accidental’ mark-making process. Utilizing discoveries in neuroscience and neuroaesthetics I will examine the effects of this ‘accidental’ mark on both traditional and digital animation production and spectatorship. I will establish that there are intrinsic qualities in the digital pixel that render the digital animation medium truly unique in terms of its representational qualities. However, this unique ability does not lie, as might be expected, in the area of digital realism, but rather in the domain of the hyperreal.

This article reviews a variety of compelling motion effects in a series of canonical avant-garde films and experimental videos, with a view to contextualizing the author’s own recent digital video work Vice Versa Et Cetera. It begins with the smooth but perplexing movement in two key examples of video art drawn from the pioneering work of Woody Vasulka, in the 1970s, and David Larcher’s high-end video works of the late 1990s. These videos are contrasted with an account of the ‘flicker effect’ in films that span avant-garde films of the 1920s through to Paul Sharits’ films of the 1960s, in which striking optical/stroboscopic phenomena dominate movement. The third point of reference concerns the perception of ‘frenetic motion’ in a range of works where the illusion of movement seems to resolve itself, or break through, despite the radical discontinuity between frames. The discussion of these films and videos, which define three different models of time-based imaging, provides grounds for the account and description of the perceptual phenomena in the author’s own work.

Motion comics can be considered as an emerging form of digital animation that typically appropriates and remediates an existing comic book narrative and artwork into a screen-based animated narrative. One such example of motion comic adaptation is The Watchmen, which was released on DVD and is also available on the iTunes online store as a digital download. This article argues that this new hybrid media raises unique considerations in terms of adaptation, and therefore provides a brief summary of key debates in adaptation studies, with a particular emphasis on the issue of authenticity. This is followed by a study of conventional adaptation practices from a comic book source and the emerging digital post-production approaches of animators and creative practitioners in the motion comic field, including a discussion on the importance of sound.