1. Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about your journey as an artist and educator?

 

Hello.

I’m currently a senior animation lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University School of Art and Design, but before returning to education, I was an animator, director, producer, and studio owner. My degree was in Fine Art, and I had ambitions of being a painter before realizing that animation was the medium that could best help me achieve my creative ambitions. Having worked commercially, mostly in kids' tv animation, it was wonderful to come back to teaching and re-connect with the work of animators and experimental filmmakers like Robert Breer, Stan Brakhage and Jonathan Hodgson. More contemporary animators such as Joedi Mack and Vojtěch Domlátil have also greatly influenced my current work and thinking about animation.

 

2. How do you approach combining experimental film and animation with a painterly aesthetic?

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As I mentioned above, I have a background in painting and I want to keep that connection with painterliness in my work. I like to use found materials and objects as well so I’m very interested in the collage aesthetic and process. I love the work of Robert Rauschenberg and his concept of working in the gap between Art and Life is also important to me. As Norman McClaren said, “What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame.” As an animator, I work in the gap between the frames and I share Rauschenberg’s fascination with the everyday stuff of life.

Another artist whose work I’ve always admired is Sigmar Polke. His use of found material and multilayered imagery have a hallucinatory quality that I wanted to try to achieve with my animation. Filming shadows allowed me to give a different sense of, space, time, and movement to the work as well as alluding to memories, and mortality, of which there was rather too much at that time of making the film during the Covid period. I had been experimenting with high-contrast luma mattes to allow me to layer images and have a third negative space element that revealed itself through its movement. Using shadows allowed me to develop the visual language further, giving a flowing, almost painterly feel.

Breaking out of the single-screen convention also opened up the possibility of moving through different combinations of single, diptych, and triptych formats which also referred back to the conventions of painting.

 

3. How do you decide which themes or stories to explore in your projects?

 

I’m interested in the concept of Animated Documentary, so most of the things I want to make work about are themed around our lived experience of the world. I like Annabel Hoeness Roe’s contention that the medium ‘can present the conventional subject matter of documentary (the world out there’ of observable events) in non-conventional ways. It also has the potential to convey visually the ‘world in here’ of subjective, conscious experience. Roe (2011).

My aim with this project was to develop a visual language and methodology that I might then be able to apply to different themes or stories. I’ve been looking at a lot of early cartoons recently, like Crazy Kat and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and there is something about the sheer craziness and absurdity of them that reminds me of the current period of late capitalist insanity. I’ve been doing early experimental tests on that theme and hope to find time to make another film next year.

 

4. What role does the concept of perception play in your creative projects?

 

When I was researching for my teaching, looking closely at the relationship between how we perceive the illusion of movement (Phi Phenomenon/persistence of vision) and philosophical ideas about our lived experience of the world (Phenomenology) transformed my way of thinking about the practice of animation. A key source of information for my investigations has been Paul Taberam’s book The Avant-Garde Filmmaker as Practical Psychologist, in which he says,“Stan Brakhage’s concept of the ‘untutored eye’ and the constructive theory of perception marks one of the clearest convergences between the concerns of avant-garde filmmakers and cognitive scientists.” Taberam,P (2018, p.87). When making work that does not conform to a traditional narrative structure, the difficulty is keeping an audience engaged. I want the work to express my subjective experience but also to invite and allow ambiguity, participation, and interpretation from the viewer. The film uses a lot of repetition and loops of animation and the shot durations and sequences are fairly long, in comparison to a traditional edit, so I hope an audience can spend time looking and wondering about potential meaning. I’ve also played a lot with sound, both diegetic and non-diegetic to suggest and subvert interpretation. The concept of embodied and kinaesthetic perception is important as well, so I used a lot of point-of-view footage of walking and looking around along with the sounds that were recorded directly of myself, footsteps and breathing, along with the natural sounds of the environment.

 

5. Can you describe your experience transitioning from the television industry to teaching animation?

 

I had a great time and met a lot of wonderfully talented people in the television industry. It’s a great industry to work in, and though there is a lot of commercial exploitation in the advertising and funding of kids tv, the people who actually make the stuff care passionately about how the content affects children. Returning to education was a revelation, they say that if you want to really understand something then you should try to teach it and it’s true. Animation is a genuinely extraordinary artform and I only really understood the potential for what animation can be when I began to teach it.

 

6. What lessons have you learned from your over 25 years in the animation and film industry?

 

Some of the key things I learned in the industry was the importance of simplicity and clarity. Staging is an animation principle that combines all aspects of the design, composition, camera, sound and animation in a scene to express the action or idea of a shot as clearly as possible. After timing and spacing, it’s the most fundamental thing animators and directors need to understand to tell stories effectively and concisely. The storyboarding and animatic processes are crucial to the studio animation pipeline and simple and clear communication of the narrative is imperative so everybody, the production team, producers and executives, and ultimately the audience understand and relate to what is going on in the action. Mercifully, my own working process is almost entirely opposite to that. It’s far more about play and letting things emerge through process.

 

7. How do you balance academic research with creative exploration in your projects?

 

Fortunately, I have managed to incorporate a lot of my research into my teaching. In addition to animation, I teach a module about perception, creativity, and meaning in relation to animation and illustration. Creative exploration is tougher to find time for, but I try to make work in any gaps I can find in the teaching

 

8. What challenges have you faced while redefining the possibilities of animation as a medium?

 

Some of my recent work has made me consider whether it is actually animation. I’ve struggled to get the film into animation festivals and had more success with experimental film festivals like Experimental Brasil. If you go back long enough in the history of moving image, you’ll find that all early ‘movies’ were called ‘animation’. I don’t really care if people want to call it experimental film or animation, I think I have the brain of an animator and that influences everything I do. I think there is such a thing as ‘animation thinking’ where you naturally apply some of the concepts you learn from animation in whatever medium your are working in. I think Michael Gondry is a great example if this.

 

9. Are there any filmmakers or specific films that have significantly inspired your work?

 

I mentioned a few in the first question, Robert Breer, Stan Brakhage, Jonathan Hodgson, Joedi Mack and Vojtěch Domlátil. I love stop motion as well so Jan Švankmajer and more recently

Niki Lindroth von Bahr, Nina Gantz and Ainsley Henderson are making great work.

 

10. What advice would you give to emerging artists interested in experimental animation?

 

Play and let things emerge through process!

 

11. How do you navigate moments of creative uncertainty or lack of inspiration?

 

If I lack inspiration I read, go to exhibitions and museums and watch a lot of films. Creative uncertainty is more difficult to navigate. Unfortunately, I think that it’s part of the deal, especially if you are working in unconventional ways.

 

12. What does the recognition of your work at festivals mean to you as an artist and educator?

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It makes me less uncertain creatively. Thank you!