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.

Challenge Narrative Structure

There are not absolutes in storytelling. Narratives can take many forms. Transcending structure is a personal goal. Logic is key to understanding narratives, but absurdism, ignoring logic, delving through surrealist landscapes is a key to the method of creating compelling and original visual communication.

Utilize Visual Metaphors

Abstraction, utilitarianism, surrealism, and all those amazing graphic fundamental methods are keys to understanding visual metaphors. Exploring metamorphism, transitionals, iconography are keys to expanding the use of visual metaphors in the works of animation.

Facilitate Personal Expression

Animation can be a method to communicate abstract ideas, concepts, philosophies. When creating animation, the medium is visual and one should be communicating to the viewer with that language. How one uses the visual language does not have to be beholden to a norm. Creating new visual allegories or methods is part of the fun of creating experimental animation.

Explore Atmosphere and Sensory Experience

Chroma, value, texture, are concepts are worthy alone to spend a lifetime exploring. Illiciting emotional response via image should be a goal of any filmmaker. Every frame of animation should stand on its own as a work of Art.

Visual Storytelling

The constant in animation is the visual element. What is expressed in the animation should be told visually to be considered a 'successful' animation.

Persistence of Vision

This is the phenomena which all of animation is pinned on. The eye is slower than the hand. Animation has many similarities to the technicals of sleight of hand magic.

Personal Experimental Works

[Link to Giphy Page]

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.

[Design Document]

This film, 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.

[Travel Expenditure]

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.

[Animation Interchange 2024]

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.