Experimental Animation
This is a page dedicated to my personal views on Art and Animation. Both those concepts are ever in flux.
The role of animation is to communicate visually. Whom is the communicator and communicatee is not an absolute.
This page is a continued work in progress. Pieces will be incomplete and concepts will just end.
Personal Experimental Works
I occasionally upload my personal experiments to the Giphy site. I find it interesting how the GIFs have evolved as a communication medium over the years.
Vignettes and montage animated by several of my students, is composed to challenge technical instruction. My students were directed to challenge themselves artistically and rotoscope pieces of a whole film. The original footage is a recorded instruction to follow the rules outlined in a Design Document. The students for this project were instructed that the Design Document is fictional and they should instead break and destroy and incorporate anything they see fit and challenge the authority in the original footage, the authority being myself.
This film originated as a response to sitting in a required meeting about how to receive reimbursement for travel through a governmental regulated third-party web portal. I took extensive notes while in the meeting, not because it was informational, but because of the context of the written words were so absurd. Filling pie charts, writing in math formulas in the portal to compute partial reimbursements was so shocking to me. When I returned to my office, I immediately recorded the voice over heard in the film. The sound was composed by Jeffery Carl Tackett. I sent Jeff the voice over file with the request to make the most post-modernist work he could muster. This is the sound file I shared with my students during a course and similar to the Design Document project, they were required to react to the sound and other found footage and public domain visuals. The individual elements the students created was uninteresting to me, so in reactionary fashion, I created my own personal responses to the students visual responses.
The collective was tasked with creating a background, each background was then handed off to a random member of the collective, then again, the animated work was handed to another member to author the audio. The result is the film linked above.
