There’s a particularly irritating school of thought for a brand of economic Darwinism, undoubtedly nurtured by Margaret Thatcher but reclaimed in recent years by politicians falling over each other to turn the rotten side of the apple away from us, and which is now applied to ‘culture’ too. It claims that, just as in biology, an economic natural selection is at work that not only fosters a spirit of competition and ‘keeps the market buoyant’, to use their language, but – a masterstroke – justifies the capitalist system itself. If it’s natural to be greedy and avaricious and cruel, if a life of gross inequality is innate, then how can we help it? We’re driven by our nature (and even supernature: the Christian church readily reinforces this message with 2,000 years of determinism… and reminds us we’re bad, into the bargain) — so let’s get on with selling one another.

The only thing that could subvert this dubious theory is the existence of something which flows contrary to competition, to capital, to boundary; which is free and beyond rule and without walls — something much like art itself, and in particular the independent, experimental, manipulated moving image. But the dubious theory has to be shown to work – a lot rests on it – and so art is shoehorned into the same grubby drawer as commerce and sport, forced to become entertainment (because while we’re not entertained, we might just start looking around for the cracks in the plaster) and told to trade in commodities in the ‘free market’.

And what better embodiment of this selfish, competitive, materialist order than sport? So it’s no surprise that the same government department which funds art also funds sport, and it’s no surprise that, increasingly, art is tied to sport itself. To sport! To the straight-ruled flags and the bloated stadiums; to the sexless bodies, dead eyes, hairless machismo; goaded by petty competition and pointless tribalism and pumped up on steroids. Sport, the antithesis of art, unchanging, unchangeable, rigid, rule-bound. Sport, which will never change the world.

We should ask ourselves, therefore: did we sanction these rules? (Did we even agree that there should be rules?) And did we decide on so reductive and pragmatic an approach that sees value decimalised, drained of its blood? We were complicit, perhaps, but blindly so. It is the result of a long, insidious process which begins in school with an unyielding programme of maths and sport: a gradual hardening, an empiricisation; a perverse, reverse coming-of-age ritual peppered with football and gymnastics and running, algebra and quadratic equations; a love-in with money and the worship of the money cardinals, and a preparation for a world of competition and flag-waving in which the human is gradually buried; passion withers and dessicates in the face of economic pragmatism. And, of course, greed. It’s no wonder that art only gets half a chance if it slopes off to the far end of the field for a furtive cigarette.

But in terms of the situation we’re faced with now, we do have a choice, and we can act. The situation may have been engineered by government departments and quangos and consultants, but we, as audiences, as participants, have responsibility too. We, for the most part, didn’t protest when Big Screens (they couldn’t think of a better title?) were erected around the country, their ‘content’ segueing seamlessly from live snooker to ‘local cultural output’, rigorously pre-selected and vetted, sedating the population. We didn’t protest, or at least loudly enough, when the flick of a ministerial pen siphoned off millions of pounds of arts funding to fill the growing concrete toothache of Stratford’s Olympic ‘village’. We didn’t do anything wrong, but we didn’t rise up either. Unless we realise that our power lies in the choices we make, and unless we continue to support the marginal, the artist-led, the budgetless, the grassroots, we’ll lose them too — and that is particularly relevant to the moving image, where the squeeze of sport on one side is matched by the squeeze of the Film Council et al’s industrialisation of imagination on the other.

The independent, the experimental, the challenging is more important than ever. It has become political once more. And this is why the radical moving image needs support… for individual works, of course; but also for events, for artists, for future audiences; to provide resistance to the creeping homogenisation and commodification of culture. But it is also why it has a duty to itself to innovate (in the true sense of the word, to introduce the new) and not be slave to nostalgia; to face the closing walls with the strength of a movement which is vital and which has currency, than one which busies itself with a retrogressive narcissism. To remember, of course, and to respond to and continue to be shaped by a past, but to look to the future, too, and to meet the challenges of the present with a strategy which is grounded in that which is contemporary.

About the Author: Adam Pugh is an independent curator and writer based in Norwich, UK. Until recently, he directed AURORA, an annual festival which focused on artists’ moving image. He is currently working on an exhibition for the Barbican, and on writing for Animate Projects, Artesian and others.

Adam has contributed articles to the German film magazine Schnitt, Vertigo and other publications, and to the annual AURORA publication, which he edited alongside its DVD edition. He has also delivered talks and curated programmes for various festivals and events worldwide, and served on the international jury at Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen.

Tate Movie promotional video

We talk to Sarah Cox about Tate Movie,  a collaboration with Aardman and Fallon, and first project of its kind – an animation film made by and for children across the UK – supported by Legacy Trust UK, a charity established to support innovative cultural activities which celebrate the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

What is Tate Movie?

It’s a huge project! The ambition is to get every child in England to contribute to a 20 minute animated film.

It was developed by the advertising agency Fallon, who came up with an idea to get kids to make a movie.

They had written a script and had brought it to Aardman with the idea of creating an animated feature film. This script along with the basic concept was then shown to me. Initially we were struggling to find a relevance to kids across the age range of six to eleven.

So my idea was that instead of a script that adults had written, we would do a series of workshops to create the story from kid’s ideas. We’d have a website as well that kids could contribute elements of the script and all the visual assets and the soundtrack too.

Is that how it’s going to work?

Yes. At the moment we are building the website with Aardman Digital, and this has become a huge and amazing project in its own right, with a real community and a virtual studio with animated HODs – an editor, an Art Director and a ‘blagging it’ director.

It’s a collaboration between Aardman (I’m freelance directing this with them), Fallon, and Tate.

Did Fallon approach Tate?

Yes, Tate are a client of Fallon’s, so Tate came on board eventually. But this has taken three years to get all the finance and partners together.

Those are three very different kinds of organisations.  How do they even understand what each other is saying when they’re in the same room?

We have a base camp, and there are two levels of communication. There’s a producer, organiser, administration and communication going on – and that’s a lot to do within the funds and the tightening of the scheduling.

And then there are creative conversations that go on too. These are between partners but also now with the key crew.

There is also going to be a Tate Movie bus going round the country, to reach ‘hard to get’ kids, because the idea is that any child, if they want to, can come to contribute. They will have an opportunity even if they don’t have a computer.

And what are they being asked to contribute?

Drawings, sound effects. On the bus there is a sound booth, so they might contribute a burp, or a scream or a violin solo.

I imagine there’ll be quite a few burps!

Exactly!  Because we want as many contributors as possible, all that I know that the film will have at the moment is crowd scenes!

On the test we had a lily pond with lily pads and lots of frogs, so loads of kids drew frogs and then we got them all to record a burp, and so each frog did a burp.

So it’ll be something like that. We might go into a garden and there’ll be 5000 bees.  And every child can draw a bee and so on and make a buzzing noise.

Are you prompting them?

Things will come out of workshops. I’m working with the script editor Lucy Murphy, and we’re building a story question tree, so it will be like ‘Who is the Hero?’ is he ‘Human, Animal’, are they ‘Male or Female…Alien’?

We hone things down and we find out at the end of the first batch of workshops what the story is about. Then that gets written… two thirds written… and then we have another session of workshops and fill in the gaps.

There will still be some holes in the script, we’re calling ‘Managed Holes’, and the contributions from the website fill in those.  That might be like, this character says something to this character, so what is it?

It’s a real crowd sourcing kind of thing.

Yes. And there’s a lot of scepticism about whether this could work in a meaningful way, but we’re really committed to it being a clear narrative.

And is it your job to assimilate and filter the sounds and images?

Yes. I’m the invisible director.

So you’ve no idea what it is going to look like?

I kind of know. I did a test with kids’ drawings, so we did a technical test. And we’re building it like staged 3D.

But a really important thing to me was that I think kids aren’t necessarily impressed by their own drawings, but if you take their drawings and put an amazing 3D camera whizzing around them and put them in a really epic scale, they would be impressed. I know that’s what I want to do with the techniques.  I’ve got an idea of the kind of look of it. But I’ve no idea what will happen, except that there will probably be some kind of crowd scene.

There are certain films that we’re imagining it might become like, because it could incorporate lots of different bits of narrative but still would have a spine to it. So we’re thinking Wizard of Oz, Yellow Submarine…

Films can really hang together by pretty slender threads can’t they?

Yes. And we’re going to have a main character that should lead us through the story.

Does that character exist yet?

No! It will come out of the first batch of workshops.

Fingers crossed!  When’s it happening?

It’s happening now. The website is being built now. The workshops start in July and the film production starts in October.

And where and when do we get to see it?

Probably summer 2011.

PLAZA, Martyn Pick, 2000, UK, Short Film, commissioned by Channel 4 Animation

APEngine caught up with filmmaker and digital artist Martyn Pick to discover how he came to be directing the new feature for Games Workshop.

Where in the World are you, and what are you doing there?

I’m in Montreal where I’m directing the motion capture feature Ultramarines: The Movie which stars Terence Stamp, Sean Pertwee and John Hurt. Its a new venture for Games Workshop who have created the hugely popular Warhammer universe. The filming of the actors was done in London at Abbey Road Studios, the pre and post-production is done in Cardiff, the translation of the acting into mocap (motion capture) was done in Santa Monica and the animation is done here.

It’s the first feature on which I am the overall director. Just before I started on this film I was animation director on the hit indie documentary, The Age of Stupid where I approached the design of the combination with a similar painterly cinematic look.

You’re a long way from home..and quite a way from how you started – you studied fine art film at Central Saint Martins. What got you started, prompted you to go to Saint Martins, rather than, say, a more mainstream animation school? What kind of films, artists and filmmakers inspired you?

I was on the foundation course at Saint Martins doing oil paintings, etchings and charcoal drawings with an expressionistic London feel (influenced by Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, William Blake and JMW Turner). I got the chance to shoot some film under a film rostrum camera where I stop framed some of my charcoal animation coming to life. The results were very interesting and it felt as if I’d stumbled upon an unexploited medium. To me, though I loved the act of painting, the fine art world at that time (early 80s) appeared alienated from mass culture and bogged down with a lot of elitist self-referential theory. Animation was very much associated generally with traditional kids cartoons but because it was a pop medium I saw fresh opportunities within it to develop my work as an artist and make a living.

And film was my real passion. Directors I liked were cinematic very visual storytellers with strong iconic imagery like F.W.Murnau, Josef Von Sternberg, Sam Peckinpah, DW Griffiths, Max Ophuls. Michael Cimino and Sergio Leone. Even at school I’d shot Super 8 but I had no idea of how to break into the industry. But with my distinctive approach to animation I had now had some leverage. I was not interested in the courses that offered traditional studio animation training as my aim was to work outside of it, preserving and developing my own work.

The Film/Fine Art course at Saint Martins seemed good because it approached film with more experimental freedom and you could use that space to play around and develop your voice.

Filmmakers such as Derek Jarman, who lectured there, had a resourceful original approach. By turning the hand-held camera movements,  smeared colours and grainy textures of cheaper formats like Super 8 into a definite advantage they created extraordinary subversive images that were years ahead of what you saw in mainstream TV or film. It imbued an indie attitude that has stuck with me. Use what you can get your hands on and make something of it.

Something else that inspired me at Saint Martins was learning about the auteur theory. The way that writers such as Jean-Luc Godard (when he was a critic) looked at Classic American cinema and saw value in the work of  genre and pulp movie directors like John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Edgar G.Ulmer and Howard Hawks. They were interesting not because they made a film with worthy subject matter or that had a very self-consciously arty or autobiographical approach. It was because they worked within the rules of gangster movies/westerns/thrillers and could actually be more free to make personal statements. They could let their conscious or subconscious personal obsessions find a focus in the discipline of the genre. This is why, although I’m known for fine art live action/animation I am drawn to genre projects such as Ultramarines.

When you graduated you made several independent, experimental films – what kinds of concerns/ambitions did you have as an experimental animator?

The idea was to be an artist and filmmaker (but not necessarily an animator) and be a distinctive one. It was about creating an identity that could open up interesting possibilities. For example with my 1987 film, Taboo of Dirt I purposefully went against the grain of either traditional animation or the middlebrow good taste of short film animation culture. I wanted it to be much more difficult to swallow: ruptured, jagged, filthy, primal and wildly expressive. I even liked the fact that the film didn’t gel. It seemed to break apart at the seams unable to solve its contradictions and therefore in some way seemed to me more alive than the nicely turned out neat short film.

I never particularly had a specific ambition within the heirarchies of UK animation. I saw it is a young medium, always mutating its form and creating new opportunities which could lead anywhere. This is what attracted me to it rather than it being a fixed classical medium with specific universally accepted standards.

When I first left college I was an assistant editor working in corporate films and advertising animatics. At the same time I determinedly stuck to doing my short films keeping my own work alive. Now I have done quite a few ads as a director and its been very enjoyable and I’ve worked with great people. I’m not really a commercials director but more a filmmaker whose work gets picked up periodically by ad agencies.

Every now and then, if my work has had a run of being used commercially I feel the need to do something that pushes the work and suggests possibilities beyond what I have just been commercially defined by.

Was ‘animator’ what you called yourself… it’s a term that’s changed such a lot?

I did used to call myself an animator although I really did not work as one in the traditional sense. I had my personal way of doing things which was my identity as an ‘animation director’ or ‘filmmaker’. As soon as I could, I started to bring live action, CGI and digital compositing into the mix. This made me a ‘mixed-media director’ or more simply just a ‘director’. It was important to avoid being pigeonholed as a hand-drawn charcoal animator. Its a trap because very often production companies represent animation directors the same way they would an illustrator with a very locked specific look. This does not give you the freedom to grow and diversify as a live action director can.

Being a director is ultimately about giving a project an overall tone and sensibility. The tools are totally changeable. You can be in your back bedroom, drawing every frame of a 20 second ident or you can be working with a hundred people on a long form project. What should matter is your tone and voice at the center of it.

Your work has, in a sense, shifted substantially – not stylistically maybe, but in technique. You still seem very interested in the painterly and textures, but the techniques you’re using now are so different from that charcoal, thousands-of-drawings approach.. What kind of ‘journey’(!) has that been?

When I worked on my early films I did loads of drawings. I often worked fast and loose which created a raw abstract expressionist spontaneity and flow- at odds with the very tightly storyboarded process of commercial studio animation.

This speedy ‘action painting’ approach is one I still employ to rough out swiftly the big picture of of a project but it is now fleshed out by a big team.

An interesting transitional film was PLAZA in 2000. Before this I had begun to incorporate live action and CGI into my work but it was always in a post-production house where there was limited and very expensive time and you did not get enough time to experiment or really get your fingers dirty.

For PLAZA I had  to composite, grade, retouch and animate the film myself on a PC. As I was integrating live action and animation, having to do it myself made me really work through my ideas with the physical materials in hand like a painter would. And as my early films like Taboo of Dirt created a style which I could then direct with teams of artists, so the process of doing PLAZA on my own generated ideas for the digital combination of live action, CGI and animation that I have been working on over the last 10 years.

These include the Budweiser commercial, the ADM commercials, the BBC EURO 2004 commercials, the Age of Stupid, the Ultramarines features and the short film London commissioned by Film London and the London Development Agency to promote the London 2012 Olympics.

And similarly, you’ve gone from working in your bedroom kind-of-thing to what you’re doing now – how different are the experiences… how easy to adapt? Similarities?

By the time I entered London’s Soho studio system at the start of the 90s it was as a director. This was because I’d made the early short films and promos on my own, maintaining my personal touch like a painter. I did everything on those films and therefore by default was also the director even though I was directing myself! Within the animation studios as a director I learned to delegate that personal touch and that’s a matter of casting the right person. If you get that right,and they understand the intention and feel you are after, over time they intuitively will do what the film needs without over prescriptive direction. Good casting is everything.

Silly Olympics, Monty Python

As there’s been much hoo-ha recently about the rather bizarre London 2010 mascots, fashioned from the steel used to make the Olympic stadium(?!?!), we bring you an equally absurd film from Monty Python. This sketch comes from 1972, a time long ago when Britain had a steel production industry and no one imagined the Olympics would be staged in London.

Here’s the Python team lampooning the Olympics with their own Silly Olympiad, held traditionally every 3.7 years, featuring competitors from over 4 million different countries. Let’s hope the marathon for incontinence won’t be included in the 2012 Games.

Production still from Sarah Cox's 3 Ways to Go

Wallace and Gromit-siring Aardman Animations are working alongside the Olympics Legacy Trust charity and creative agency Fallon to harness the creative talent of a million UK primary school children for a film to be showcased at Tate Modern and cinemas across the country.

The 20 minute film – the first to be produced by Tate – will be directed by Sarah Cox, whose many award-winning films include two made for Animate. Children from across the country will be asked to contribute paintings and drawings for the film, and 6000 will be able to take part in 35 workshops with professional animators and Aardman staff. The Ideas and images generated by the children will form the basis for the finished film, which it’s hoped will be completed by autumn 2011.
More information about the project  here.

Mariscal - Drawing Life, 'Shower Tunnel', Photo: Timothy Davey

Just a few days left to catch this delightful retrospective of Spanish designer and artist Javier Mariscal, one of the world’s most innovative and original designers, with a rich and diverse body of work that spans cartoon characters, interiors, furniture, graphic design and corporate identities.

And best known for giving Barcelona its graphic identity as it emerged from the Franco era, and introducing the world to Cobi, the official mascot of the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games.

The exhibition at the Design Museum ends on 1 November. Then on 2 November, Mariscal performs his live animation Conference, at BFI Southbank. Info and tickets here.

Win tickets in our competition.

Conference: animated conversations created live by Javier Mariscal

On 2 November renowned Spanish designer and artist Javier Mariscal will be performing at the BFI Southbank in London. By creating and controlling animation film footage in real time, Mariscal has devised his ‘Conference’ which is the spontaneous and instantaneous application of his creative thinking onto the silver screen. In this energetic live performance Mariscal manifests the images, voices, narrative and content that transport his characters, the Garriris, from the universe of his imagination onto the screen.

Javier Mariscal is probably best known for the creation of the adaptable and versatile mascot for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, as well as iconic designs for company identities, interiors and products. His first UK retrospective at the Design Museum ‘Mariscal Drawing Life‘ runs until 1 November. Catch the exhibition and then see this stunning event finale brought to you in partnership with the BFI and the Design Museum.

Thanks to the BFI we have a pair of tickets for each of the events happening on 2 November. To win a pair of tickets to see Javier Mariscal on 2 November, send us your answer to the following question: what is the name of the Olympics mascot that Javier Mariscal designed? To be in with a chance to win, email your answer to engine@animateprojects.org by 30 October and tell us which event you would prefer to attend.

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire began with a story, a manuscript found in an attic that told the tale of Russian revolution and exile through Europe to Northern Ireland from the point of view of a young and romantic girl – director Dan Edelstyn’s Grandmother, Maroussia Zorokovich. Her words and vision prompted a documentary journey into Ukraine’s present and history culminating in the discovery of a Spirits Factory expropriated from these ancestors in 1917. Thus began a whirlwind adventure into vodka and the desire to create a positive intervention in history, creating and marketing a new brand of Vodka called Zorokovich 1917 and linking the dwindling village of its origins to a new European market.

This reawakening of the family spirit of entrepreneurship is charted in the film and inter-cut with dramatic reconstructions of scenes from the original manuscript. The film has been acquired by More 4 and will have a theatrical release and be broadcast in 2010. The film is the latest project by Optimistic Productions, a dynamic partnership between Dan Edelstyn and artist Hilary Powell. Alongside the film Optimistic Productions also host ‘Optimistic Immigrants’ events bringing together other stories of migration in film, music and performance. Be sure to take a look at APEngine’s interview with Hilary, where she talks about the film and discusses her ongoing fascination with urban space, cultural memory and the 2012 Olympics.

Credits
A film by Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell

Hilary Powell

Hilary Powell is an artist whose imaginative and interdisciplinary practice is consistently engaged with the changing urban environment and its secret histories. She has made theatrical installations in derelict sites across Europe from a car ballet/concert on Amsterdam Docklands to projects in Berlin factories and empty London lidos.  Hilary has a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmith’s College where she extended this investigation around eventful practices within urban spaces. A recent commission for Archway by AIR at Byam Shaw School of Art and Islington Council involved a participatory roller-skating extravaganza in an overlooked urban site creating the film animation ‘Light Years Away’.

Hilary’s film ‘The Games’ marked the beginning of her ongoing engagement with the Olympic site and its changing fringe lands. She is involved with local company ‘Pudding Mill River: Purveyors of Sporting Spirits and Foodstuffs’ as they gather and market the last wild harvests of this Olympic zone and sponsor many of the events she holds focused on the power of creative practice operating around large scale regeneration projects. Recent events include ‘Blue Movies on the Greenway’ screening films onto the last remaining sections of the former Olympic blue fence and a prototype float in cinema projecting films onto boats made out of this blue fence.

Hilary is a partner in Optimistic Productions with Dan Edelstyn, and when not prowling the fringes of the Olympic site she is working on their feature film for More 4 called ‘How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire,’ subject of an APEngine showcase.