Visual Narrative: Lip Sync – Jason and the Adventure of 254 exhibition, Jason Wilsher-Mills, Wellcome Collection, 25th April 2024

I’m a huge fan of art that is fun and meets people at whatever level of art knowledge they approach it at. In my own animation practice, I really want to bring my experimental, fine art interests together with my sense of humour and desire to make things that can engage a wide audience. This exhibition was perfect for seeing that kind of work in practice. Artist Jason Wilsher-Mills approached a complex and difficult experience in his life, exploring both the physical and emotional trauma of his disability, but he tells his story with humour, colour and a range of ways for visitors of all ages to engage with the art.

Accessibility is a huge part of this exhibition, which I love. There is an audio guide recorded by Wilsher-Mills himself, tactile flooring to guide the visually impaired, and visitors are allowed to touch all of the works. When I was listening to Wilsher-Mills talking about the huge sculpture of himself in the middle of the room, I leaned my arms against the side of it to get comfortable, and somehow that made me feel more connected to what I was looking at and listening to. Interactivity and participation in art is something I’m obsessed with, and want to keep on coming back to in my practice when I get the chance.

My plan for this project is to infuse a little of the concept behind this exhibition, by bringing my own experimentation and humour to my work.

Visual Narrative: Monochrome – Impressionists on Paper exhibition, Royal Academy, 9th March 2024

Things I took away from this exhbition:

  • Different ways artists used both wet and dry materials on paper – but I was looking more at the use of dry materials e.g. pastels
  • Working with the textures of the paper
  • Different ways of creating tone, showing light and shadow
  • I particularly love the Degas ‘Woman Combing Her Hair’ for the way he’s really captured the movement. The places where he’s redrawn the lines, e.g. her arm and knee – even if that was just him correcting himself, it really feels like you can see her moving. It looks like frames of an animation layered on top of each other

Production Principles: Out of Your Head, first animatic

We decided the next step was to create an animatic, which just needed to be the most important few keyframes for each shot, held for the length of that shot. To do this we needed to make the shot list even shorter, but we managed to condense it even further into fourteen key moments and make a storyboard together:

We shared the keyframes among us to turn into full-sized drawings, and then I put them together into an animatic:

Collaboratively made animatic

An interesting development that came from making this animatic was actually a stylistic decision. We all really liked Evelyn’s drawing for her keyframes, which we done digitally but looked like they’d been made pastel or charcoal:

Keyframe drawing for animatic by Evelyn
Keyframe drawing for animatic by Evelyn

It reminded me of William Kentridge’s animation, which I shared with the group:

If we adopt this sort of style for the 2D section at the start, the animation as a whole will maintain a handmade feel throughout. That would help to unify the two different animation mediums, while still keeping the important contrast between the black and white 2D section and the colourful stop motion section.