Animation & Storytelling

*This project is on hiatus as of 2023*

This UARTS Faculty Engineering/Arts Student Team (FEAST) is open to artists, designers, visual and audio engineers, filmmakers, writers and other imaginative thinkers and makers who desire to work collaboratively on a new multi–media artwork produced through printmaking, animation, and storytelling. I seek to visually stretch the boundaries of analog and digital realms of art–making into a multi–media experience. The project will imagine a range of eventualities, from invented and hybridized narratives to unexpected scenarios suggested through visual and audio representations. I am looking for a diverse team of creative minds and makers interested in bringing their full range of talents to carry this project to fruition. Every team member will play a crucial part.

My current creative research, a visual project titled Dream, consists of a series of short, experimental animated films standing as a counterpart to a 50-feet long allegorical color woodcut hand-carved and printed on Japanese paper. While the animation and woodcut are visibly apart from each other in terms of their format of delivery, tactility, and interaction with the audience, both are envisioned to coexist as a single wholistic act. The animation exists as an encircling narrative, and the panoramic woodcut stands as a still picture. In its present state, Dream has been selected into invitational art exhibitions/conferences in which a partial or full project will be presented in the United State, Asia and Europe in 2021-2023.

I seek to explore possibilities of editing my current woodcut prints from Dream Series and integrating them with other visual and audio resources into experimental animated film(s), which, when completed, can be presented in both art galleries and museums, as well as staged in open public spaces.

Each part of the project, storytelling (writing), drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpted props, digital animation, audio editing and more, will inform the others. Disparate images, photographs and sculpted props will be scanned as blueprints and, via animation, brought into short film(s). As written, visual and audio amalgamations and translations emerge, they will form new narratives and scenarios that will exist precisely because of such calculations.

FEAST members will be involved in all aspects of production. From an operative angle, they will work on generating and processing visual and audio data, as well as filming, animating and editing. Creatively, they will be contributing to storyboarding, brainstorming, making and presenting completed work, and more. Once the initial collaborative experiments begin to emerge, potential for additional creative work will present itself.