ANIMATE! EXTENDING THE IMAGINATION

 A unique British project, and a genuinely pioneering initiative, animate! exists to commission innovative artists’ animation for terrestrial television screening. Over the past 17 years it has produced 90 films, amongst them some of the most remarkable works of modern British animation. Supporting established filmmakers and industry mavericks alongside emergent talents and cross-disciplinary practitioners, it welcomes all forms of animated experiment, but especially hybrid approaches, seeking to support a manipulated moving-image practice that explodes any conventional definitions of what animation might be.

At the risk of hymning a golden age, there’s no denying the transformative impact Channel 4 made on UK television when it launched in 1982. From its pioneering structure as a publisher-broadcaster, commissioning work across all formats, to its early commitment to genuinely leftfield cultural and political fare, it was flexible, accessible and radical, and became the natural habitat for striking new visions and voices.

animate! was born into this hothouse in 1990, as a sponsor of manipulated moving-image work not primarily motivated by character and plot. Nearly two decades later, it is the longest running broadcaster-linked project ever funded by Arts Council England, maintained by the most consistent commitment made by Channel 4 (or any broadcaster world-wide) to the independent production of innovative and challenging film and video.

This longevity is owed not only to the passion and commitment of key personnel in those organizations, but also precisely to the way in which, over the years, animate! has established itself as an arena for experimentation – a space in which risk-taking and boundary-crossing heads the agenda. Across dozens of films, animate! has developed an identity and attitude that is the opposite of monolithic, prescriptive or preemptive. This hydra-headed quality is fundamental to its position in the current moving-image landscape, not least because it acknowledges the huge shifts in both animation technology and production infrastructures.

The fragmentation of creative industrial practices in the 1990s – the rise of garage geniuses, bedroom brains, music-promo magicians conjuring images out of the unregulated air – was matched in importance only by the technological accelerations that made such endeavors possible. The almost definitive switch from film to the digital, the falling cost of home production hard- and software, the exponential growth of the internet: all fed into a sector that was already experiencing the blurring of boundaries between art and commerce, between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, between modes of distribution and exhibition, between the hands-on artist and the artist who hires hands.

For all this ferment, animate!’s primary formal objective remains to make single-screen films for television transmission, with the filmmakers always retaining copyright and ownership of their works. (Channel 4 gets license to two UK transmissions.) Perhaps there’s a clarity in that fixed remit. The infinite treasure chest of the digital toolbox can sometimes paralyze choice: aesthetic possibilities are potentially endless. The fixed frame of television requires the artist’s creative journey to be steered by ‘real-world’ technical parameters and legal underpinnings, thereby ensuring that there will be no barriers to the film’s life after this first outing. In short, what works there (TV being perhaps the hardest moving-image medium to win over) provides a necessary and rigorous frame within which to test and play.

The television orientation also puts experimental animation into the wider culture, however briefly. It means there may occur that chance encounter that changes a viewer’s preconception of the moving image and its possibilities. That open appeal is reflected in animate!‘s commissioning style, too: applications are entertained from anyone, regardless of whether they consider themselves an ‘animator’ or not.

Finally, animate! allows filmmakers of any hue to concentrate on what matters most: the creation of a personal vision that extends the possibilities of the moving image, while addressing issues, emotions and ideas that concern us all.

As films move ever deeper into digital intervention and the construction of synthetic space and character, animators can grasp the vast opportunities afforded to them by moving-image manipulation. Those who define animation merely as a frame-by-frame process (like a line of dominoes knocked together), or as special effects to be considered in post-production, will never be amongst the creative visionaries of this extended cinema.

In this light, animate! contains the etymological seed of its own success. It brings to life, it inspires. What a culture looks at, how it sees, what it allows into or excludes from the frame makes it or breaks it. animate! makes a space for the extended moving image because it believes in the extended imagination. By bringing dreamt worlds to life before us, it underscores its allegiance to the possible rather than the probable. Build it and they will come. www.animateonline.org

Gareth Evans

Gareth Evans is a writer and programmer. He works with animate! (animateonline.org) and edits the moving image journal Vertigo (vertigomagazine.co.uk). He lives in London.

ANIMATE!  EXTENDING THE IMAGINATION

Screening and Panel Discussion

Program 1 of 2

Thursday, June 28

4 pm – 5: 30 pm

Northwest Film Center:  Whitsell Auditorium / Portland Art Museum

Panelists:

David Curtis (Central Saint Martins School of Art)

Dryden Goodwin (Slade School of Fine Art)

Irene Kotlarz (Platform International Animation Festival)

A unique British project, the longest running creative collaboration between a broadcaster and national arts agency anywhere in the world, animate! exists to commission innovative artists’ animation for terrestrial television screening. Over the past 17 years it has produced 90 films, amongst them some of the most remarkable works of British animation in that time. Supporting established filmmakers and industry mavericks alongside emergent talents and cross-disciplinary practitioners, it welcomes all forms of animated experimentation and especially hybrid approaches, seeking to support a manipulated moving-image practice that explodes any conventional definitions of what animation might be. Offering a generous retrospective over two programmes, Extending the Imagination aims to do just that, celebrating the myriad worlds and ways of seeing that only the animated realm can offer.

Program 1 (c 70mins)

Visions of childhood – light and dark – and childlike dreams of how things might be run through this award-winning selection, from Rotting Artist and Who I Am and What I Want, with their savage and satirical explosion of everyday looking, through Chris Shepherd’s disturbing and delirious take on an inner-city adolescence, to Run Wrake’s remarkable fable of village England greed and Tim Hope’s witty and delicate surreal tales. Couple these with a range of dazzling journeys, in both place and purpose, taken in the company of 13’s lonely palm pilot hound, Flight’s solitary fugitive and the utopian scientific hopes of Exposure, Tulips at Dawn and Perpetual Motion, and you have a programme where detail and the dreams of distance coexist in inspirational equilibrium.

·      Rotting Artist (2002) by Ann Course & Paul Clark

·      Exposure (2003) by Peter Collis

·      13 (2004) by Simon Faithfull

·      Rabbit (2005) Run Wrake

·      Dad’s Dead (2002) by Chris Shepherd

·      Minema Cinema (2004) by Tim Hope

·      Flight (2005) by Dryden Goodwin

·      Tulips at Dawn (2002) by Rosie Pedlow

·      Perpetual Motion in the Land… (2004) by AL + AL

·      Who I Am and What I Want (2005) by David Shrigley & Chris Shepherd

ANIMATE!  EXTENDING THE IMAGINATION

Program 2 of 2

Friday, June 29

4 pm – 5: 30 pm

Northwest Film Center:  Whitsell Auditorium / Portland Art Museum

Program 2 (c 70mins)

Hit the ground running with Gary Carpenter’s sensational surface trawl, continue the motion with Jonathan Hodgson’s hyper-sensitive city centre stroll, and enter the dreamscape of celebrity unpicked with Interstellar Stella. What we have here is a hypnotic road movie of the mind and (matters of the) heart, whether it’s how you pick up the pieces after Valentine’s Day in 15th February, or pick up the beat in Jukebox. Throw in a slice of time care of Ferment, a slice of very unusual life via Kingdom Protista and assorted moments of (im)patience and revelation in Hotel Central, Purple Grey and Proximity, and the questions raised by Scrutiny find perhaps their welcome answer in the end epiphanies of Sunset Strip.

·      Miles from Anywhere (1997) by Gary Carpenter

·      Feeling My Way (1997) by Jonathan Hodgson

·      Interstellar Stella (2006) by AL + AL

·      15th February (1995) by Tim Webb

·      Jukebox (1994) by Run Wrake

·      Ferment (1999) by Tim McMillan

·      Hotel Central (2000) by Tim Hulse

·      Kingdom Protista (2000) by Andrew Kötting

·      Purple Grey (2006) by Sebastian Buerkner

·      Scrutiny (1995) by Ian Cross

·      Proximity (2006) by Lise Hansen

·      Sunset Strip (1996) by Kayla Parker

Screenings dedicated to the memory of Dick Arnall, animation producer and director of animate! (2000-2006).