Tunnelling into the Dark
On working with narrative and experimental process, the influence of one's creative environment, buried meaning... and a short story.
Test animation for Palmersville (2008) by Edwin Rostron
In my November post I talked about animating ‘blind’ - making an animation without being able to see it until the end - as a way to combat fussiness, overthinking and constant reworking. The hope being that in this ‘darkness’ something might emerge from a deeper recess of the mind, something new and surprising and yet still somehow recognisable.
This kind of attempt to control my creative brain does tend to steer me away from making story-based work with characters, work that needs to be plotted out in advance and to some extent designed beforehand too. There are more technical requirements and considerations for that kind of work which make an ‘unconscious’ unthinking approach more difficult. As a result most of my films are fairly abstract. But many years ago I did make an ‘experimental’ animation with a story and a character, a film which sometimes nags at me as a kind of ‘road not taken’.
