The Space Between Frames: animation, emptiness and hapless delusion, 2020.
image composit by Yoel Hill.
Why is it that animators, conjurers of cartoons and comedy, fun cousin to grown-up live action, to all appearances carefree and chaotic, so often present as glum, inward, distracted ... bewildered?
Reflexive Perplexities: The Virtual Camera in She’s Not There, 2017
co-authored with Louise Harvey
We report on the conception, production and delivery of the live music, live performance, 3D animated project She’s Not There that opened the CILECT congress in Brisbane November 2016. We discuss the operations of the virtual camera in framing the virtual 3D space within the real space of the theatre stage. We muse on this Mixed Reality mode within the context of Goudal’s conception of cinema as fostering in its audience a ‘conscious hallucination’ (1925); the appeal of our project is contingent upon the audience being able to view outside of the frame while enjoying the fantasy within, to knowingly invest in its illusion.
Read the full article at: http://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/ijfma/article/view/6158
Death and the Ute, 2017
or Driving a Metaphor Way Past its Roadworthy..
1994 red Holden rodeo dual-cab utility –a humble truck, nothing remarkable, not particularly blokey, certainly not ‘muscle’, nor pleasant on the eye .. and yet.. a vehicle to bigger stuff ...
Read the full article at: https://medium.com/screentypes-journal/death-and-the-ute-a78e2073f32b
She’s Not There: When New Illusions Meet Ol’ Time Real Time; Mo-cap, Virtuality and Live Music Performance, 2016
co-authored with Louise Harvey
(Animation) began as something other than drama. It was not a story in three acts; it was a singular event, like an implausible trapeze act …
(Norman Klein, 1993)
“There is no interest in achieving the possible, but it is exceedingly interesting to perform the impossible.”
“Astound me!”
(Serge Diaghilev, 1909-1929; Director of The Ballets Russes)
She’s Not There: new illusions meet ol’ time real time opened the CILECT (Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision) congress, Queensland Conservatorium Theatre, Brisbane, on the morning of November 20, 2016 (see Figure 1). Conceived and directed by the authors, Louise Harvey and Peter Moyes, and produced by Peter, the project used motion capture of a vocal performance by Christine Johnston ...
Read the full article at: https://journal.animationstudies.org/peter-moyes-mo-cap-virtuality-and-live-music-performance/
Introduction to Animation Fixation exhibition, Logan Art Gallery, 2016
Animation Fixation provides insight into the process of animation through the presentation of stills (or captured frames), publicity posters, and the screening of finished films. The animation production process is so long that the final film might best be appreciated as a punctuation mark, the ‘full stop’, at the end of an often arduous journey. With this exhibition’s inclusion of posters as a nod to the marketing and distribution efforts that follow, perhaps a ‘semi-colon’ is the most apt signifier for the relatively small space that the finished film takes up in the overarching life and trajectory of an animated production..............
Read the full article at: http://www.logan.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/365575/Animation-fixation-flipbook.pdf
On Music and Animation, 2015
Animation was there at the start –at the beginnings of synchronized sound for cinema. Disney’s Steamboat Willie, not the first but certainly the most iconic (read ‘well marketed’) of early toon soundies, screened in 1928 –Jolson uttered his first few celluloid words in 1926. The term ‘mickey-mousing’ is still used to refer to a straight-forward approach to audio-visual synchronization.The relationship between music and animation has and continues to be a healthy even vigorous one. Betty Boop, Mickey, Koko et al, appeared not to be able to keep still, all bouncing around in anticipation of a post-sunk musical beat. Indeed, a musical beat provided just the rhythm to structure animated movement in sustaining an illusion of life; a story beat continues to drive narrative pacing.......
Read the full article at: https://medium.com/screentypes-journal/on-music-and-animation-97a0e63fdf68#.fvtu7ogiy
In the footsteps of Lao She: a Griffith Film School study tour of Beijing, 2015
Meeting a bakers dozen of disheveled animation students and beleaguered colleague at Beijing international airport, 1AM — not a great sight. Wall-eyed and punch-drunk.Driving one and half hours to who knows where, for what knows what in the way of lodgings. Along highways, through roadworks, barren poorly-lit strange-to-us landscapes. Not a great start. The view through that smeared bus window: perhaps an opening pov to a very grisly movie with a not happy ending. Arrive at lodgings: student dorms. flights and flights and flights of stairs with broken bags and sinking hearts, all by the light of one sad phone. Upstairs and one inch mattresses (why not just make them 2 or 3 or 4? — bugger the expense!)............
Read the full article at: https://medium.com/@p.moyes/in-the-footsteps-of-lao-she-a-griffith-film-school-study-tour-of-beijing-screen-types-journal-c42f68f5b37e
Entry for The Reel Deal catalogue, celebrating 10 years of the Griffith Film School, 2014
morningside. 1980s 90s. tafe. queensland college of art. griffith university. the smell of paint (yes, paint). and pencils and charcoal and paper (yes paper). clay blobs in motion. drying racks of painted cels. low ceilings. sweat. cement block architecture. soviet era. gum trees. one trailer option for food (of sorts). bain maries and the rumour they cut the green bits off the meat. lightboxes. the steenbeck. like the cockpit of a sci-fi saucer. strips of film (yes, strips of film). hanging. sutured together with sticky tape. mechanical things. nuts and bolts and moving parts. long nights. tears. the rostrum camera. huge. its own room...........
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Mice and Elephants, curatorial essay for Shadow of a Mouse exhibition, Royal Queensland Art Society Gallery, Brisbane, 2013
Animation has never just been about animation. The cave wall sequential etchings of prehistory, of human in pursuit of beast, spears suspended midflight, were perhaps as much about ritual and social cohesion—a talisman for future success and group survival—as they were about ‘story’ and the illusion of life. Eadward Muybridge's human and animal locomotion studies, the photographic origins of the moving image, are as much about zoology, physics, and anatomy, as they are about a travelling show and that legendary wager regarding the cadence of a horse's trot. The thaumatrope, praxiniscope, zoetrope, etc. doubled as middle-class toys of enchantment as well as devices of inquiry into human perception; in offering a contemplative distance on the illusion of life, they were sometimes labelled “philosopher's toys”.....................
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Veiw full catalogue here : Download PDF
Recent Estonian Madness, curatorial notes for Estonian Animation program, the Brisbane International Film Festival, 2007
Variously labelled absurdist, grotesque, insane, and unique, Estonian animation is best summed up as... er… Estonian. Difficult to define, it thrashes about like a red herring, taking its first opportunity to escape your grip to rejoin the mad splash. In seeking to tame this cinema into category and submission, you find yourself in a similar predicament to Priit Pärn’s mad rabbits from Night of the Carrots (1998), who vainly plot to bring down aircraft lumbering overhead by thrusting acupuncture pins into voodoo vegetables. …And therein lies the joy. These animations cling to the edge of narrative, with just enough grip to appease our need for story, and plenty of rope to hang logic. Fresh from a recent dream, fantastic juxtapositions and wonderful scenarios astound, perplex, and fascinate...........
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The Dog Dood it! program and notes for Tougheye International Turku Animated Film Festival, Finland, 2001
It seems logical that, as man's best and most user-friendly pal, the domestic dog should have been taken up so prevalently by the animator's imagination. Fuelled by the medium's ability to give life and form to human fancy, it was inevitable that the animated dog should hop up on its hind legs and speak its mind. Just as we read much into the mute responses of our canine friends, the use of dogs in animation perhaps tells us more about ourselves (and our desires) than sheds much light on anything doggy.........
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Cartoons of the Moment: An Australian Retrospective curatorial notes of Dresden Festival of Animation and Short Film 2002
Hours were spent trawling the dusty archive of Australia's national treasure, ScreenSound Australia, in search of titles that would best represent animation production from its beginning in this country through to the 1970's. The rationale for this time frame is that more recent animation production has been well represented in festivals of late, whilst the notion that Australian animators have been putting putting pencil to paper to celluloid as early as any other country.......
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