South Africa
Please give us a brief summary of your work, including, if possible, a description of your creative process (e.g., how your creative ideas first appear and take shape).
I work as an artist making drawings. Sometimes those drawings are erased and continued in front of the camera and become an animated film, sometimes these animated films are used as backdrops in theatrical performances and become a kind of animated scenography.
I never ever make a script or a storyboard. The day I decide I want to start making a film, the first footage will go through the camera. The main series of charcoal animated films I made were first shot in 16mm film. Up until now they have been shot on 35mm film, but since there is no longer film to be bought in South Africa, nor a laboratory to process them, I suspect the next one will be shot digitally.
I start with one or two images or ideas, and because the filmmaking with the animation obviously takes many months, there’s a lot of time during the drawing of the first sequences to think about associated images that could come in front or behind them, and the story gradually constructs itself, both in the drawing process and as the process continues with the editing. So, from the second month, say, after eight months, I’d be working both with an editor and a composer, trying to tease out what the film could become.
How would you define your animation practice in terms of its relation to fine art traditions, experimental animation or the (historical) avant-garde? Its relation to commercial industry?
I came to animation as an artist, although if I look back, the first animated films I made were when I was 13 or 14 just with a Super 8mm camera. The success of drawings on thin tracing paper photographed, and working with pixillation of people moving in front of the camera in the studio. But the essential work I’ve done which is the charcoal animation, came out of the fine art work which was coming out of the charcoal drawings. It was not a technique I developed for animation, the animation simply became an extension of the recording of the process of making a drawing.
Seeing [Norman] McLaren’s animation when I was about 15 years old was for me a huge revelation. It showed that one could make animated films not only in the style of Disney or Tex Avery with traditional cel animation.
Who/what are your strongest influences?
Well, McLaren opened the door. But then I suppose Dziga Vertov and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) would be the single most important film.
Why animation?
I think that temperamentally, I’m bad at commitment. And there is with animation a provisionality built in. Every frame is only there for the 25th of a second. Any mistake can be rectified, everything can always be rescued, there’s always a possibility of redemption. But it’s also a question of either seeing the world as a fact or seeing the world as a process.
Is material or media a particularly important component of your practice? How does it operate in your work?
The material and medium are obviously vital. I’ve done a lot of animation with charcoal, and a lot of animation with torn bits of paper, simple jointed paper puppets and some work with pixillation.
Is there something you want to articulate with your work that can’t be expressed through conventional narrative means?
Well I think it’s not so much there’s stuff I want to express which can’t be done with narrative means, it’s just that I’m not able to write a narrative film – to write a script or storyboard and work from there. The ideas that I have to write in advance are always much less interesting than the ideas that emerge in the process of making the film.
How do you see your work operating culturally and politically?
I think the way I see all art operating is a demonstration of how we make sense of the world. And that processes that are very obvious in the studio, the artificiality of the meanings that we make, the invitation of the audience to be agents in the construction of meaning are things which are normally invisible in the world, but the same processes apply. Taking fragments from the world, rearranging it and emerging with a possible constructed sense of it.
Reference
Vertov, Dziga. Man with a Movie Camera. Russia, 1929. Film.