Welcome to Edge of Frame
A Substack about experimental animation
Welcome to the Edge of Frame Substack. Here you will find writing about artists working in bold and daring ways, using animation to pursue personal visions, raw expressions, formal experiments and investigations into unknown territory.
This Substack continues on from the Edge of Frame Wordpress blog (2013-2022) which featured a range of experimental animators, from Amy Lockhart to Hoji Tsuchiya, from Lizzy Hobbs to Bruce Bickford. As with the blog, the focus here remains predominantly on interviews, delving into artists’ methods and techniques, their routes into animation and the contextual issues around their work. With embedded videos, process images, links and more, these posts provide a detailed insight into the work of artists at the forefront of experimental animation practice. I’ll also be talking to curators, writers and others in the field, as well as posting some news, links and reviews.
Paid subscribers to this Substack will receive at least one in-depth interview or article per month, plus access to the archive. All subscribers will receive occasional shorter posts with links and news.
A few years after starting the Edge of Frame blog I began putting on screenings and events. Since then I have shown work by over 200 artists at major venues in the UK and beyond. Becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack gives crucial support to all Edge of Frame activities, providing a platform for experimental animators and stimulating discussion of their work.
‘Experimental animation’ is a loose term which raises plenty of questions. Nevertheless it is probably the most straightforward and commonly understood label for the type of work I want to cover. It encompasses a huge variety of techniques and approaches, and overlaps into many other disciplines. This makes it hard to pin down, but it is also what makes it so vibrant and interesting.
To quote the preface to one of the very few books solely devoted to this area, Robert Russett and Cecile Starr’s ‘Experimental Animation, Origins of a New Art’ (1988): “They settled on the title Experimental Animation, for want of a better term, as the only one broad and elastic enough to embrace the extraordinary range of cinematic works… Despite the obvious limitations of the word “experimental,” the editors have used it to suggest individual techniques, personal dedication and artistic daring.’”
I am a practitioner in this area myself and my writing tends to reflect this (that’s a clip from one of my recent films above). I also inevitably gravitate towards the work that excites and intrigues me personally. I am particularly interested in the working processes of artists using animation, something I feel is often very important to an understanding of their work. The use of improvisatory techniques and a kind of ‘thinking through doing’ are not uncommon in this kind of practice, and ‘experimental’ would seem a wholly appropriate term for this type of approach. However the scope will remain broad and flexible, so work produced by studios, teams of people, commercially and otherwise will also find its way in.
There are perhaps more people making and watching experimental animation than ever before. Despite this there are still relatively few organisations, books, websites or festivals solely devoted to this area. The Edge of Frame Substack aims to provide a useful resource for other artists, animators and anyone else who is interested in this work, and will hopefully generate further discussion in the comments.
“Delving into the many offerings of Edge of Frame demonstrates the rewards of taking a chance, of welcoming strange ideas and experiencing new things.”
- Little White Lies