Animation Practice, Process & Production - Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2013

Live performance combined with projected animation is both very new, with advances in projection mapping and motion sensors, and very old, harkening back to pre-cinematic projected séances, magic lantern shows, and to Winsor McCay’s vaudeville performances with his ‘trained’ animated dinosaur, Gertie. Three contemporary artists embrace accessible tools, like stop-motion programs and hand-drawn animation, to single-handedly create and choreograph one-woman performances populated not only with their own bodies, but also with various animated figures, forms, and designs. Kathy Rose began as an animator, and then later performed with her projections. Miwa Matreyek uses her own figure as a silhouette in her performances, and creates remarkable imagery with two projectors and a screen. Eva Hall’s Nautical Apsara combines stop-motion and digital animation and live dance. All three women project themselves as characters into their animated performances. Each employs different aesthetic approaches, but all reference magic, dream, and mythologies in their work and their imagery. They choreograph their movements to synch with their animated images. The artists play a role behind the camera, and in front of the screen, and play with the dual nature of creator/director and subject/performer. Unlike studio animation, where there have historically been few directors or lead animators, women have had a strong and influential role in independent animation. This paper investigates how these three women from the world of independent animation, by inserting their physical bodies alongside animated projections of their bodies directly into the work and onto the stage, are creating work that fits within a larger tradition of women’s kinetic bodily performance, breaking new ground. My discussion includes my own live performance with animation.

In this research Campbell challenges the dominance of Disney styled classical animation and its associated drawing principles that are dictated as part of a teaching process. Campbell’s learning and teaching approaches come from a practitioner perspective, and are about maintaining a wider and more applied version of drawing in a digital age in which the construction and manipulation of images can be done in so many various ways. It stems from the idea that in order to create the illusion of performance (which Campbell defines as ‘emotion through movement’), an animator has to be able to experience the performance (personally, or through observation or imagination) first, and then produce drawings that are based on a more personal relationship to the performance.

Results so far are more obviously intuitive and more allied to emotional as well as observational empathy, and crucially, come about through apprehending motion as it happens. The application of this method is also more aligned to developing personal research and creative development methodologies for animation practice, even when working as part of a team.

Relating two essays by Benjamin (‘Painting and the graphic arts’ and ‘On painting, or sign and mark’, both from 1917) with Eisenstein’s ‘The dynamic square’ (1930), this article proposes that the drawn line of early animation transcended the surface to challenge established modes of perception at a time of important social and cultural changes.

Benjamin addressed the ‘sphere of the sign’, specifically the meaning of the line within it, and established the difference between horizontal and vertical display (graphic and art work), highlighting the accomplishment of the work of art’s ‘inner meaning’. Eisenstein’s text, presented when the cinema industry was debating the introduction of the wide-screen, questioned the screen and frame proportions.

Relating Benjamin’s ‘magical properties of the line’, Eisenstein’s questioning of the frame and animated film references, this article will trace an approach to the essence of the line as a metaphysical element of transcendence and ‘deterritorialization’ (Klein 1993), suggesting that, in the process that takes the drawing from paper to screen, the lines accomplish their ‘meaning’; and become a projection of an ideal of liberation of body and frame, challenging its limits.

In 1946, the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí was given the opportunity to realize an animation called Destino in cooperation with Walt Disney. The painter was highly motivated to explore different kinds of smooth transitions between the scenes. For Dalí, this was a way to further develop his already elaborated method of polyvalent ‘double images’ by enhancing it with explicit dynamics. A short typology of the different alternatives to the hard cut that Dalí envisioned is given here. The key aspects are anamorphosis, transmigration of forms, metamorphosis, figure/ground-reversal and change in reaction. The Japanese artist Tabaimo shares several iconographic motifs, as well as formal solutions, with Dalí. With her animation installation teleco-soup, it can be shown that astonishingly small pictorial interventions into a scene suffice to completely transform the interpretation, spatial suggestion and the way the beholder is located in relation to the image. Although objectively the scene remains similar, a great deal changes at once. Therefore, these ‘visual rhymes’ can be considered as condensed, elegant and surprising forms of expression.

When talking about Animation as a graphic or a plastic cinema it is underlying a certain idea of what the medium is and how it is different from live-action films. On the one hand it is about creating the movement and on the other hand it deals with an infinite kind of techniques related to fine arts and graphic arts to produce the images needed, in a word: the forms. Among these techniques, the Stop motion as a privileged medium based on frame-by-frame, shows that reality and its matter can be animated too and not only the abstract space of the representation, be it a drawing or 3D modelling. With Stop motion, even if the technique can be ‘reduced’ to animating puppets and a set or clay for example, we will argue that its specificity lies more specifically in the possibility of changing the propriety of a matter and its limit of elasticity to the point of breaking the consistency of things, transmuting the substance into another. In this state of thing, the link between creating form and creating movement cannot even be drawn anymore because the form and movement are one and the same consequence of the substance behaviour the artist is giving to matter, whereas in traditional animation you create a form more or less stable and you make it move. This art, now interrogating the global notion of arts of movement, cease to be a graphic or plastic cinema and becomes what we would call a plasmatic cinema. The form never really gets a permanent consistency and integrity to be able to be seen as a moving object or subject but as pure protoplasm constantly transforming and redefining a matter. Indeed, the natural limit of elasticity of matter can be modified with Stop motion to the point that anything can become subject to plasticity – not only a gum in cinema or the body of a drawn character in animation, for example. In these kinds of cinema the matter is pure virtuality, where in Stop motion it is real matter becoming virtual through the plasmatic process: movement is just a change of the form and form just a change of character through movement. The whole matter of the world is becoming a material to be liquefied and redefined where movement and forms are sharing the same state of the art. If a plasma is in chemical research the fourth state of matter (with solid, liquid and gas) we would say by analogy that it also helps to define another kind of animated picture dealing with a perpetual fusion (or fusing) of forms. In that sense, Stop motion is exemplifying what is plasticity of motion, in the overall arts of motion.

This article documents the making of Ryan Grobins’ second animated short film, The Rose of Turaida.

This article describes the various animation techniques we used in creating our short animated piece, Si Lunchai (based on the Indonesian folktale of the same name). We took our aesthetic inspiration from Indonesian Shadow Puppetry (Wayang Kulit). Because 3D animation technology provides many ‘naturalistic’ advantages not available in traditional shadow puppet performances, much of the challenge of the work involved seeking out compelling compromises between retaining the aesthetic value of the original Wayang Kulit, while also taking advantage of the various affordances of 3D animation. Among other things, this essay describes working with 2D characters in a layered (2.5-D) environment, character mobility and pivot points, character ‘flipping’ and our attempt to maintain some sense of the live action quality of Wayang Kulit theatre.

The fulldome immersive film format is chiefly about space. Immersive film production is currently undergoing stages of development towards a modern, cinematic language comparable to the development of rhythmic montage developed by Eisenstein and Soviet cinema and followed by the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s.

This paper explores the reciprocal interaction of cinematic montage with the fulldome format. In fulldome films, the metric aspect of rhythmic montage can be evoked through the translational time of the eye across the hemispherical screen. Immersion affords the extension of the internal logic of the film into the architectural space of the theatre. This external architecture becomes an organizing element in the compositional flow of the film, giving the viewer room to build their own field of associations to create meaning. This article questions what new cinematic language can emerge specific to a nascent avant-garde/experimental fulldome cinema, examining the potential of structural montage and collage techniques to create rhythm by combining spatial with chronological sequencing.