An Eyeful of Sound

2012-02-06T16:17:00.000Z

There's a really good blog post here about the life of a freelance animator. It's written by Scott Benson who makes beautiful work like this:

and this.

Sigh. And now I'm going to have to read the rest of his well written amusing blog and WHEN WILL I WORK?

Neuro psychology mini-conference at UEL

2012-01-24T08:21:00.000Z

The conference at the University of East London was organised by Dr Ashok Jansari and Rebecca Gordon as a way of bringing together the research teams associated with Ash's diverse research interests around prosopagnosia, synaesthesia and ways of measuring executive functions in children (JAAM-C).

Ashok gave the key note for this mini-conference, and gave us the hot off the press information on the Live Science experiment about facial recognition he and his team have been doing at London's Science Museum for the past three months. They had literally finished a day or two before but he was still able to give us some snapshots of information about what they'd found, including identifying a healthy number of "super-recognisers", ie people who scored extremely highly in recognising faces in their tests. Apparently there are some people who claim to be able to remember faces even years after a fleeting meeting, and this is the opposite of prosopagnosia (AKA face-blindness, which is the subject of part of my PhD) where subjects have serious problems in being able to recognise faces at all. You can do the online Cambridge face test here if you fancy seeing if you are a super recogniser. If you are please contact Ashok!

Naomi Wells talked about her forthcoming comparative study of developmental, early acquired and late acquired prosopagnosia. One of the issues I am finding about prosopagnosia is that it manifests in very different ways depending on whether you were born with it or have acquired it later in life. I was quite relieved to hear that these differences are acknowledged issues and it was fascinating throughout the afternoon or presentations to hear information I've heard anecdotally being backed up with scientifically proven figures, graphs and studies.

Rebecca Gordon talked about her Msc project using a virtual reality environment to measure executive function (also known as 'superior cognitive constructs', which I loosely translated as the process of growing up and maturing which happens - hopefully - during adolescence) which was really fascinating and a wonderful example of using game/animated environments to find out about reality (I claim this as a score for the validity of animated documentary!).

I was going to attend anyway but I was really pleased to be asked to present my PhD work in progress about prosopagnosia too, despite its very different provenance from the rest of the (super-scientific-brainiac) research. I always feel it can go one of two ways when you present across disciplines; either they won't know what you're on about and will be baffled by the relevance to their area, or else they'll slightly over-value its difference from the rest of the papers and really enjoy it. Luckily it was the latter this time. Who doesn't love a bit of cartoon?

Post graduate animation research conference, Bournemouth

2012-01-21T18:57:00.000Z

I've recently come back from a couple of post graduate research conferences. One was the first meeting of the animation post-graduate research group at the Arts University in Bournemouth and the other was at the Psychology Department at the University of East London. Working on a PhD can be quite isolating, no matter how supportive your supervisors and cohort are, and having the opportunity to present work in progress in a supportive environment of knowledgable peers is really helpful in building confidence and making connections with people dealing with the same issues as you.

Bournemouth was a great explosion of animation PhD information. It was eye opening to meet so many people from all over the country working on different aspects of animation post graduate research. The day was the inaugural animation PGR group meeting (it has existed as a Google group for a few months, initiated by Dr Paul Ward who hosted the first meeting) and was an opportunity to present extended papers and get feedback. Normally at a conference the paper is only 20 minutes long, but here we could talk for 30 (plus plenty of time for questions) which was a practical way of getting into the meat of our phD concerns as well as using the audience as a sounding board.

The presentations were all very diverse in subject and approach, most were pure research but a few were based on practice led work so it was a nice mix. There was a brilliant feeling of camaraderie amongst the group and the feedback was all really constructive. Animation as an area is notoriously friendly (I always think it's because we're all so pleased to be away from our animating desks and in a bit of company...) which can sometimes lead to charges of not enough rigorous criticism but this definitely was not the case here. I came at with some good suggestions about how to improve my work and reinvigorated about working on my research subject.

There's going to be a second animation PGR meeting in London at King's College later in the spring, please join the Google group if you are interested in attending.

Article in Animation Studies online journal

2012-01-07T12:06:00.002Z

Ooo, a bit of a plug here but I have had an article published in the Animation Studies online journal here dealing with the animated documentary and 'pyscho-realism'.

It's my first academic article publication. As part of my PhD study over the last 15 months I have given several papers at conferences and had a couple of them accepted for publication, but academic publication can take ages so getting the final product out there can be a protracted and tortuous road. The Animation Studies journal, edited by Nichola Dobson, is online which I think makes the turnaround quicker than it would be if it were real paper. The benefit is that it is much more accessible for readers - if you can bear to please do have a look ...

Regional funding for (feature) film

2011-12-08T10:12:00.001Z

See here for info about Creative England's new regional film funding.
They say:
"The Development Fund is inviting applications from individual writers, writer/directors and/or producers based in the English regions for the development of all types of feature films, including animation and documentary. Applications are also invited from writer/director/producer teams. Funding is available for the costs of developing a screenplay (or the equivalent for documentaries) such as research costs, writer’s fees, script editor/developer support and script readings. Funding will also be available for screenplays that are ready to be presented to potential financiers, to help with budgeting, scheduling, casting, producing teaser trailers/pilots, and other expenses associated with raising finance and generating sales and distribution interest. The Development Fund totals £250,000 in its current round and applications are welcomed on a rolling basis. Awards will range from £2,500 to £25,000."
Interesting. It's good news that animation and documentary aren't going to be sidelined, although the fact that it's exclusively feature does seem to place the emphasis more on live action drama (and that's certainly how it reads to me). I wonder where short film will fit into their strategy?

Museum visit with animators

2011-12-05T12:28:00.001Z

Last week we met up with our animation team to go and have a closer look at the objects that we are animating for the Shrewsbury Museum project. It was an exciting opportunity to see the objects close up and get to handle them. The whole afternoon was a crash course in pre-history for all of us, taught by curator Emma-Kate Lanyon and interpretation officer Phil Scoggins. It was quite mind blowing and a really good way of getting to the heart of the meaning and purpose of each object.

L-R: Arin Sotoudeh, Emma-Kate Lanyon, Ravi Mehru, Matt Ayris & Sam Moore

Ravi investigating a beautiful gold torc

Phil explaining the provenance of these giant elk antlers

Us peering at the Nescliffe spoons

Terri getting to handle a really cool Bronze Age sword!

An iron age escutcheon, spookily like an upside down skull...

Matt with a polished stone axe

The art in science

2011-11-24T15:57:00.001Z

Guardian article here about this image of the neutrino. Beautiful.

Wild Life: new film directed by Wendy Tilby & Amanda Forbis

2011-11-17T09:42:00.001Z

Even though this apparently has been on the festival circuit for several months I entirely missed the release of the first Tilby/Forbis collaboration for 12 years. Their last film was When The Day Breaks which is one of my all time favourites, and I'm really looking forward to seeing this one in full. It's up for Oscar nomination so I wish it (and Iain Gardner's film, The Tannery) lots of luck!

Flip 2011

2011-10-31T11:12:00.000Z

Flip animation festival ran again this year, continuing to defy the odds against a small regional festival celebrating a squeezed and marginalised art form managing to continue in such an unwelcoming economic climate. The festival has undergone a change of management and a decrease in funding but was is still full of life, debate, engagement and above all enthusiasm for animation as a robust form. Not that there weren't some dreadful films screened, but that's all part of it, isn't it? I think that the really rotten ones give us all hope.

Amongst the amazingly good films were The Skeleton Woman, directed in France by Sarah Van Den Boom, a beautifully lyrical and moving film which I just drank in. Also great were Flea and Fly - a wonderfully bittersweet homage to 1920s animation with a fresh take on content, directed by Brazilian Fernando Miller - and Plugs, directed by UK based Tom King, which was a funny exercise in good timing and design.

There was a really helpful session on showreels, with Barry Purves, Michael Nagasaka from Frontier games, Mike Foley and Glenn Holberton from Loose Moose. There was tons of useful advice on putting a reel together, including four brave souls who screened their showreels to be critiqued by the panel. Pleasingly the panel all screened their own reels too and critiqued that too - it was one of the most helpful sessions of that sort that I've been to.

Another highlight was a session on how to be a good student by Daniel Waterman & Gary Carse. They were brilliant, very concise and articulate, their message boiled down to "work like a demon and stop complaining" which is what we tell students every week ... Unfortunately it clashed with the Bill Plympton master class which all of my students went to so I made lots of notes to feedback to them afterwards.

Overall I really enjoyed my Flip day - best of all it continued the next day too.

American Synaesthesia Association conference, University of California San Diego in pictures

2011-10-31T10:58:00.000Z

ASA organiser and artist Carol Steen at the opening night reception

Opening night reception view - sunset over the pacific!

Me, Wajid Yaseen (University of Middlesex) and VS Ramachandran (University of California San Diego)

VS Ramachandran's brilliant opening talk

Me looking confused by my own paper - easily done

A wonderful wig shop in Dan Diego, visited with my friend Heidi Rhodes

Me in wig - looking spookily like my mum

Postcards from Europe

2011-10-22T16:59:00.000+01:00

Today I went to the Postcards from Europe exhibition at Wem Town Hall in Shropshire.

It was a really interesting collection of postcards sent by emerging artists in Europe to curators Lucy Biddle and Rosie Gainsborough.

The project is funded by the European Commission's 'Youth in Action' programme and was supported by NOISEfestival.com and Wem Town Hall. NOISEFestival helps young creative people (aged 15-30) starting out on their career paths to develop their skills, access opportunities and enable them to gain income from their creativity. This is very cool, especially at the moment when graduates everywhere are being told what an awful world they're going to be thrown into and arts in general is being pinched, squeezed and denigrated.

by Isabel Greenberg

It reminded me of the sketchbook project, it seems like there's a renewed interest in and glamour around tangible objects as opposed to the purely digital which is really nice to see. The works all had an illustration / decorative arts slant which made them look particularly graphic and beautiful when shown together on the sunny walls of the gallery. I liked the way that the envelopes they'd been sent in were also displayed - some of them were just as interesting and lovingly illustrated as the postcards themselves.

Lucy Biddle (l) and Rosie Gainsborough (r)

New studio for graduates

2011-10-19T09:47:00.000+01:00

Four of our Wolverhampton graduates from last year have recently set up their own animation company, Sector 5, there's an article about them on the Animation Forum West Midlands here. I'm so proud of what they're doing, they have an excellent skill-set between them and I know that they're already working on several projects.

I love that on their website on the 'animators' page there's a feed to all their twitter accounts so you can see what's going on for them - they all have some really interesting projects going on as we lead up to the Flip animation festival next week (at which, by the way, Bill Plympton will be speaking!).

Stone and antler sketches

2011-09-29T18:23:00.000+01:00

More sketch book images for the Shrewsbury Museum project. The bottom one is the time line colour palette, with the colours changing as the time does - the scope is 10,000 years!

Museum object sketches

2011-09-23T09:00:00.000+01:00

I thought I would post some of the sketches I have been doing for the Shrewsbury Museum animation project I have been working on. They are amongst the first ones I did, from the other side of the glass cases, trying to get a sense of the objects and what they did. The elk antlers are just an amazing object, you have to walk round them to really get a sense of their huge sculptural presence.

I love the axe mould because it's so practical ; a big lump of stone which has a different axe head size and shape on each side. It might have been lugged around by a itinerant bronze metal worker, and would have been a much more efficient use of space and weight than individual moulds. It was very heavy though...

The harpoon was made out of antler, and has little soft teeth to catch a fish without shredding it.

Finally the infamous iron age spoons, as discussed in my last post. The torn looking gap on the plain spoon is where the little hole would originally have been, through which 'liquid' would have been dripped onto the patterned spoon held underneath. Time and erosion have eaten away at the metal so now it looks kind of accidental, especially as the hole isn't in the centre as you might imagine (well, I did).

Shrewsbury Museum animation project

2011-09-21T07:00:00.000+01:00

I've been commissioned by Shrewsbury Museum and Art gallery to make a short animated film about their pre-historic collection, to be displayed in the new space which they are currently renovating (the Music Hall in Shrewsbury town square, it will be an amazing space). I just visited the museum to have a closer look at some of the objects which will be featured in the animation, and they opened up some of the cases so I could handle them. I've been sketching and drawing them through the glass over the past month or so, but it was a very special opportunity to finally get to hold them in real life. Plus I had to wear CSI style gloves! Cool.

These are the Nesscliffe spoons (above) a pair of Iron Age spoons which are very rare and thought to be part of some kind of Druidic rituals. In the Portable Antiquities Scheme annual report (05/06) they state that "It has been suggested that liquid (not water) was allowed to drip or pour through the hole in one spoon, perhaps on to the bowl of the other". I love that "not water", so very understated. It has also been suggested that the liquid might have been blood (or, less excitingly, beer), which is most categorically not water.

Me holding a tiny, fragile and beautiful flint arrow head.

For me the most thrilling object was a hand axe (below) from early Palaeolithic times, by far the oldest object in the collection. It would have been used before the end of the last ice age, as a general all purpose tool, for anything from cutting wood to skinning an animal.

The truly amazing thing about it though is that it wasn't used by humans, it was used by h omo heidelbergensis, the most 'recent' relative of homo sapiens (i.e. us).

I held it in my hand and the edges were all really sharp, until I eventually found the one position where it sat comfortably in my palm. You would have cut your hand using it in any position but one, and that one allowed you to access all the cutting edges from lots of different angles. It was incredible to think how long ago someone else had the same thought processes I had about how to use it.

Hand axe

Fantoche 2011

2011-09-19T14:19:00.001+01:00

I'm just back from Fantoche, which was a wonderfully warm and friendly festival in Baden, Switzerland. There was a theme of animated documentary running throughout the festival, and I was invited along to take part in a day of lectures and discussion on the genre. The other speakers were very high end - it was chaired by Marcy Goldberg, and had Bella Honess Roe giving an over view of animated documentary, Dennis Tupicoff talking about animated documentary and trauma, Shira Avni talking about animated documentary and therapy, Rokhsareh Ghaemmghani talking about animated documentary and portrait and me talking about animated documentary and music. Overall it was a really stimulating event and the topics discussed seemed to prompt some really interesting and thoughtful responses to the genre of animated documentary.

The cafe and bar for film makers and audience to mingle

Sign to the thermal baths, too tempting a detour...

The lovely Annegret Richter, animadoc curator of the Leipzig Dokfest

Documentary maker Rokhsareh Ghaemmghani, artist Akram Sarakhti and her grand daughter