A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea:

Animated!

Days 6 and 7: Remote Residency at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland, 7/18/22 to 8/13/22,  Maria Driscoll McMahon checking in from New York State

I have been wanting to animate my drawings for years, but the thought of laboriously replicating hundreds of drawings for five seconds of movement was not appealing. To be clear, I was never interested in "cartoons," à la Disney animation.  I want my animations to be like my other work - particularly my still drawings - just as moving sequences  incorporating layers of image, sound, and time.

A decade or so ago Windows had a neat little app called "Windows Movie Maker."  It would make still images "jiggle," replicating the experience of watching an old movie. Aliens and Healers were made using some drawings I had and mining some lines from attempted poems I had lying around. Imbuing drawings with the most minimal illusion of motion can be transformative. 

As fun as was "Windows Movie Maker" (now discontinued), I wanted to do more. Discovering the work of William Kentridge  a couple decades ago and seeing his process was a revelation. Kentridge is an artist who is making powerful, expressive, socially conscious two-dimensional work, but adding sound, sequence, and motion enables even greater possibilities for evocative narrative. 

Since that time,  I have been introduced to the work of many other artists working with time-based media - video, animated drawings, stop-motion "clay-mation:" the ingenuity of techniques is only matched by the ingenuity of content. Artist colleagues I know - including artists who have been members of our collective, 2X2, Sandra Stephens (video and projections), Christine Heller (animations and projections), and Ben Altman (muti-channel video) - have worked with time-based media. Currently, three of my favorite contemporary artists working with animation include Julia Oldham, Sun Xun, and John Knecht. 

I have reached out to some animators to ask them for hints about their process. I was stunned to learn that Photoshop can be used for animation. I already knew a little bit about it, but am now trying to learn "deep" Photoshop. I am taking a course via Domestika with Rodrigo Miguel.  His Instagram page has many examples of animations by various artists. 

My practice and process are not usually something that happens in a public forum. Mistakes and failures usually happen behind the scenes; only finished, refined projects are reserved for the web-page or social media. Learning animation is a slow, but rewarding process, and I am definitely on a learning curve. 

So announcing that I aspired A Forest Sounds Like a Ship at Sea to be an animation/projection project is my way of "living on the edge!"  Displaying my nascent animations is definitely venturing outside my comfort zone.  What follows is the result of spending all of Sunday experimenting both with Photoshop and "old school" animation techniques. Early efforts of the day were frustrating and I was entertaining the idea of discarding the whole idea of animation. However, I persevered through the doubt and exasperation and, in the end, I was ecstatic I got my mountain lion to move!  Call it "garage band" animation, but where there is movement there is hope for sound, story, expressive possibilities to follow!

Note: my big cat is a composite of  SEVERAL sources including still photography and moving images.

My drawings with a Photoshop "poster" filter and color

The original "old school" drawings in their rough state with some corrections begun. 
The roughest manifestations were rejected and discarded. 

"Fresco" filter in Photoshop. I was intrigued with the expressive line. 

Beginning to render (always my favorite part).  It is now very late at night and I have to force myself to stop to sleep. I could easily exist, again, as the pencil-wielding creature of the nocturne which was my younger manifestation. 

Voila! My first ever animation! If it were music, it would have been made in a garage, but the big cat's head moves and this makes me very happy! The mountain lion, by the way, will become a character in my final animation/projection. She will accompany many of the other creatures who inhabited the mid-19th century forests of Ridgebury, Pa., and West Cork, Ireland.  Much more to come!