This year, on 21-23 March, AUT held its inaugural animation festival: Animation Revelations. Due to a hectic schedule I only managed to attend two of the many events offered.
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| © Photo copyright Zak Waipara 2013. Pass from the festival. |
One of these was the animation programme titled The Case for Abstract Animation. Though I am still interested in both experiencing and creating more overt forms of narrative, I have also become intrigued with the possiblities of other, less literal, narratives, particularly with regard to motion graphics. I present here, in paraphrased form, some notes I managed to take from the introduction to the screening.
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Malcolm Turner, the curator of the festival, described abstract animation as a subset of the animation field, a specialist area but important nonetheless.
In his opinion, creative indie auteur animation is the pinnacle of human animation, which provides a pathway for animators and audiences trying to push the artform.
Turner believes that everybody who works in the general field produces something that has the whiff of abstract animation about it - even the most obvious forms of animation have this quality about them - and yet most animators try to create the opposite: striving for the hyper-real. He noted that animation takes a lot of effort, and each animator has only a few films inside them, so they need to be judicious with time and resources. Turner described abstract animation as the R & D engine room of the animation world, and discussed how this practice examines the limits of the cinema frame, and teaches us how the frame can be breached by the power of imagination.
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| Blurb from the programme. |
I agree with Turner that experimental cinema of this kind takes risks and can produce unexpected results. And the analogy of an R & D engine room shows how these experiments often find their way back into the mainstream via the intersection of art and commerce. For example, Shynola, a collective I referenced in my Honours exegesis, used the techniques of direct animation based film-making (as pioneered by such artists as Len Lye) to produce the Scott Pilgrim film titles. They also employed remix, delving into student era work to add a sense of realism to their technique.
It’s amazing to see that in a cyclical way, this kind of work has found a voice again. It always used to feature in film festivals’ animation programmes - what I used to refer to (with tongue in cheek) as ‘squiggly line films’.
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| © copyright Tumanako Productions 2010. |
I have been fortunate to have the chance to work with a different type of abstract animation inside of a documentary format: Powhiri: Welcome or Not. My animation was more formal and geometric in its approach, drawing as it did from Maori patterns, and it was also influenced heavily by motion graphic design techniques. I was able to work in this fashion due to the director Kay Ellmers, who saw the possibilities that such abstract forms held for offering new storytelling techniques for more mainstream projects.
Motion design seems to be well suited to employ aspects of experimental animation, situated as it is inside so many disciplines. As such, this is an area worthy of further investigation.
