The 22nd Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference

McLaren Legacy Panel

Friday 9th July
9.15 - 10.45 (lecture theatre)


With a view to the centenary of Scotland’s most famous animator in 2014, the panel will examine his legacy in Scotland and throughout the world. The panel will discuss the extent to which McLaren’s name is known and promoted in his homeland within the industry and in education. The NFB rightly hails his contribution to their success but does Scotland? Does his work still inspire new animators? How important is his nationality within his legacy and how important is his legacy within his nation’s industry?


Confirmed panelists:
Dr Jonathan Murray – Edinburgh College of Art (Chair)
Karl Magee – University Archivist, University of Stirling.
Iain Gardner – Independent animator
Elizabeth Hobbs - Spellbound Animations, 2005 EIFF McLaren award winner

With support from the University of Stirling

Schedule

Animation Evolution
The 22nd Society for Animation Studies Annual Conference
9-11th July 2010

Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland

The conference will take place at Edinburgh College of Art located at Lauriston Place, Edinburgh. All session rooms will be clearly marked and registration will take place in the foyer of the main building.

There is a special event planned on Friday evening after the panel sessions: details can be found here. After which there will be a drink reception at The One Below, The Rutland Hotel (1-3 Rutland Street), sponsored by the SDI.

The schedule includes several coffee breaks throughout the weekend, all refreshments provided. Lunch on all three days is also included in the delegate rate. Sunday's lunch break will also include the SAS AGM.

On Saturday night delegates are invited to the conference party at The Counting House, 38/6 West Nicolson Street, where a buffet will be served (there will also be an opportunity for those interested to watch the World Cup runners up match).

Please note that the schedule is subject to change.

Friday 9th July

Saturday 10th July

Sunday 11th July

Friday 9th July

8.00 - 9.00 Registration

9.00 - 9.15 Welcome (Lecture Theatre)

9.15 - 10.45 Roundtable Session – Norman McLaren Legacy (Lecture Theatre)


10.45-11.15 Coffee Break


11.15 – 12.55 Paper Sessions
Urbanimation- Representations of the City (Lecture Theatre)
• “Never forget who you are and where you are from”: Persepolis as urban memoir (Paul Ward, (Chair) Arts University College Bournemouth)
• In the City: Animating 21st Century Britain (Van Norris, University of Portsmouth)
• Urban Nightmares: Anime City Spaces (Caroline Ruddell, St Mary’s University College)
• Indexing a Dystopian Future in Metropia (Bella Honess Roe, University of Surrey)

Biographies (Room J05) - Chair: Robert Musburger, Musburger Media Services
• Chris Marker: animator and avatar (Edwin Carels, University College Ghent)
• Experimental Animation and Visual Effects: Illusive Applications of Innovative Visions (Pamela Turner, Virginia Commonwealth University)
• Drawing Upon the Unconscious: Text and Image in two animated films by Robert Breer and William Kentridge (Mirriam Harris, Unitec New Zealand)

Applications in Cognitive science (Board Room) - Chair: Kirsten Thompson, Wayne State University
• Cross-modal verification, weak synaesthesia, and the case of visual music (Paul Taberham, Kent University)
• Animating unique brain states: The Animated documentary and “psychorealism” (Samantha Moore, University of Wolverhampton)
• Animation Therapy (Joan Ashworth & Helen Mason, Royal College of Art, London)
• Reading the Rorschach (Caroline Parsons, University of Wales, Newport)

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch Break

14.00 – 15.15 Paper Sessions
National Movements (Board Room) - Chair: Tony Tarantini, Sheridan College
• Beyond Outsourcing: Indian Animation Education and Transnational Aesthetic Exchange (Timothy Jones, University of Southern California)
• Tradigital Mythmaking – New Asian Design Ideas for Animation (Hannes Rall, Nanyang Technological University Singapore)

Histories (Room J05) - Chair: Rebecca Coyle, Southern Cross University
• The Lightning Cartoon: Animation from Music Hall to Cinema (Malcolm Cook, Birkbeck College, University of London)
• Walt-to-Walt Oswald (Tom Klein, Loyola Marymount University)
• Going to the Dogs (David Williams, University of Teeside, Retired)

Literature and Narrative (Lecture Theatre) - Chair: Dan North, University of Exeter
• Morel_Morello_Morella: The Metamorphosis of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Invention in a (Re)Animated Universe (Maria Lorenzo Hernandez, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia)
• An Analysis of the significance of human-animal conflict in Princess Mononoke (Amy Ratelle, Ryerson University)
• Yeats, Joyce and Animation’s Field of Transformations (Tom Walsh, Arts University College, Bournemouth)

15.15 – 15.45 Coffee Break

15.45 – 17.00 Paper Sessions
Genre studies (Room J05) - Chair: Gan Sheuo Hui
• Insomniac Nightmares (Richard Leskosky, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Shiver me timber: Animating gay porn (Adam de Beer, University of Cape Town)

Live action and digital cinema (Lecture Theatre)- Chair: Helen Jackson, Binary Fable
• Crossing Boundaries: Communities of Practise in Animation and Live-Action Filmmaking (Harvey Deneroff, SCAD and Victoria Deneroff, Georgia College and State University)
• Animation Scriptwriting and Transmedia Tension (Brian Fagence, University of Glamorgan)
• Etch-a-sketching in 3D: Technological Optimization and Technophobia in Pixar’s Toy Story and Monsters Inc. (Colleen Montgomery, University of British Columbia)

National Histories (Board Room) - Chair: Timo Linsenmaier
• Subversive Strategies in Soviet animation of Brezhnev period: Andrei Khrzhanovky’s “In the World of Fables” (Irina Chiaburu, Jacobs University, Bremen)
• The Appearance of Genre Characteristics in Hungarian Animated Films (Zoltan Varga, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)
• Art in Transition: Bulgarian Animation after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Nadezhda Marinchevska, Institute of Art Studies, Sofia)

17.30 – 19.00 Scottish Animation Network - Retrospective Screening

19.00 – 21.00 Evening drinks reception - The One Below, The Rutland Hotel

Saturday 10th July

Saturday 10th July

9.00 - 9.30 Registration

9.30 - 10.30 Keynote – Clare Kitson (Lecture Theatre) - Chair: Paul Ward, Arts University College, Bournemouth

10.30 - 11.00 Coffee Break


11.00 - 12.30 Roundtable Session - Convergence (Lecture Theatre)

12.30 - 13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 14.45 Paper Sessions
Gaming and Virtual Realities (Lecture Theatre) - Chair: Birgitta Hosea, Central St Martins College of Art & Design
• Animation and Augmented Reality (Erwin Feyersinger, University of Innsbruck)
• Contextualising dynamic emotional facial expression animation (Robin Sloan, Abertay University)
• The lively user: The Nintendo Wii system and the (re)animation of the player (Patrick Crogan, University of the West of England, Bristol)

Character and Performance (Room J05) - Chair: Van Norris, University of Portsmouth
• Actors in Sin City’s Animated Fantasy: Avatars, Aliens or Cinematic Dead-ends? (Pierre Floquet, IPB, Bordeaux University)
• Heavenly Voices and Bestial Bodies: Issues of Performance and Representation in Celebrity Voice-acting (Rebecca Miller Asherie, New York University)
• Avatar, “e-motion capture”, and the shifting industry rhetoric around performance/animation hybrids (Lisa Bode, University of Queensland)

14.50 – 16.05 Paper Sessions
Audiences and Interactivity (Room J05) - Chair: Pam Turner, Virginia Commonwealth University
• New Opportunities for Real-time Simulation in Animation (Mark Chavez and Liu Lin Yi)
• Not just for Kids: engaging an online adult audience with animation (Helen Jackson, Binary Fable Studios)
• From the first to the fifth screen: the evolution of narrative animation across contemporary screens (Deborah Szapiro, University of Technology, Sydney)

Interdisciplinary approaches (Lecture Theatre) - Chair: David Williams, (Retired) Teeside University
• Textile and Animation Theory: Who Needs it? (Jessica Hemmings, Edinburgh College of Art)
• Art, Animation and the Collaborative Process (Heather Holian, University of North Carolina)
• Blending Media: Expanding Animation in Contemporary and Interdisciplinary Research Fields (Suzanne Buchan, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham)

16.05 – 16.35 Coffee Break

16.35 – 17.50 Paper Sessions
Pedagogy and online learning, theory & practise (Lecture Theatre) - Chair: Tom Klein, Loyola Marymount University
• Watch and Listen! The Website (Gunnar Strom, Volda University)
• Point and Click and Learn: Not Just Educational Benefits of Adventure PC Games/Animated Films of Czech Independent Game Development Studio Amanita Design (Eliska Decka, Charles University, Prague)
• Utilizing investigations in neuroscience to aid teaching first-time animation students (Steve Weymouth, University of New South Wales)

National Identities (Board Room) - Chair: Paul Ward, Arts University College, Bournemouth
• Animation Re-Orientation: Animation Forum West Midlands, G(local)isation and the Creation of Regional Network Communities in the New Digital Age (Kerry Gough, Birmingham City University)
• The Golden Ages of Animation: Diverse Origins in Canada and the U.S (Lynne Perras, Calgary University)
• The Israeli Animation of Jewish Tradition in “The Animated Haggadah” (Raz Greenberg, Hebrew University, Jerusalem)

CG Aesthetics (Room J05) - Chair: Pierre Floquet, IPB, Bordeaux University
• Animation Proliferation: is animation destined to be the dominant mode of expression and production for the Film and Television Industry? (Tony Tarantini, Sheridan Institute of Technology)
• There Be Dragons: Animated Visual Tropes and Fantasy Aesthetics in Mainstream Live Action Cinema (Jane Shadbolt, University of Newcastle, Australia)
• On the edge of the uncanny cliff: motion capture and animation in recent 3-D computer-generated photorealistic films. (Gregory Bennet, AUT University, New Zealand)

20.00 – 24.00 Conference party, The Counting House (buffet included)

Sunday 11th July

Sunday 11th July

9.20 – 10.35 Paper Sessions
Theory & Methodology
(Lecture Theatre) - Chair: Caroline Ruddell, St Mary's University College
• “The Three Ps in Coraline: Postfeminist, Psychoanalytic and Postmodernist approaches to the Animated Film” (Estefania Martinez, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale)

• Lines of convergence: the rhetoric, materiality and disciplinarity of the line in defining ‘animation’ (Richard Stamp, Bath Spa University)
• Filmic Consciousness, Gendering Spacetime, and the Rupture of Animation (Mark Bartlett, Open University)

New Media
(Room J05) - Chair: Miriam Harris, Unitec, New Zealand
• Animation as New Media: or Ontological Quest for Animation Media Epistemology (Hee Holmen, IT University of Copenhagen)

• Subversive or Submissive? User-Produced Flash Cartoons and Television Animation (Michael Daubs, University of Western Ontario)


Animating Iran: History, identity and the socially motivated animation (Board Room)
• History in Black and White: personal story, petty history and political manifesto in Marjaneh Satrapi’s Persepolis comic books and its animated version (Fatemeh Hosseini-shakib (Chair), Tehran Art University)
• An animated mirror: Preliminary Thoughts on Iranian Socially Oriented Animation (Reza Yousefzadeh-Tabasi)
• Mutually Inclusive: an investigation into the history of animation-documentary interaction in Iran (Rokhsareh Ghaem-Maghami)

10.35 – 11.05 Coffee Break


11.05 – 12.45 Paper Sessions

Techniques (Lecture Theatre) - Chair: Harvey Deneroff, SCAD
• Liquid Color in Animation: Chromatic Paradoxes of Form and Abstraction (Kirsten Thompson, Wayne State University, Michigan)
• Unseen Hands: The Work of Stop Motion (Alice Gambrell, University of Southern California)

• Drawing Animation (Birgitta Hosea, Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London
• Bunraku’s Exploded View of Performance (Dan North, University of Exeter)


At Death’s Insistence: Theorising Animation and Death (Room J05)
• An Eclipsed Birth meets an Eclipsed Death (Janeann Dill, University of Alabama)
• It's Raining Coyotes: Death and/in the Chase (Michael Dow, New York University/ North Eastern University)
• The Lifeworld of Wall-E: A New Generation (Freida Riggs, Independent Scholar)
• (The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix, Part III: Death and the Death of Death (Alan Cholodenko, (Chair) University of Sydney)

Representation
(Board Room) - Chair: Amy Ratelle, Ryerson University
• "We're Asian, More expected of us!" Representation, The Model Minority and Whiteness on King of the Hill (Alison Loader, Concordia University, Montreal)
• The Transformation of the Teenage Image in Oshii Mamoru’s Sky Crawlers (Gan Sheuo Hui, Kyoto University)

• “Masculinity Between Animation and Live Action, or, SpongeBob v. Hasselhoff” (Shannon Brownlee, Dalhousie University, Halifax)

• Animating Disability:Screening and discussion (Shira Avni, Concordia University Montreal)


12.45 – 14.15 Lunch (to include SAS AGM)


14.15 – 15.55 Paper Sessions

Music and Sound
(Room J05) - Chair: Richard Leskosky, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• The Role of the Minimalist Musical Aesthetic in the Line Films of Norman McLaren (Aimee Mollaghan, University of Glasgow)
• Silence,Sound and Music: theories of animated listening (Ross Winning, University of Wolverhampton)

• Selling reality: the role of sound in creating narrative reality within animated film and visual effect sequences (Peter Hodges, University of Glamorgan)

• AUDIOMATION: Animation Film Music in the Brave New Era (Rebecca Coyle, Southern Cross University, Australia)

Cross Platforms (Board Room) - Chair: Maria Lorenzo Hernandez, Universidad Politecnica De Valencia
• The Darwinian rise of Urban Kinetics (Carol MacGillivray, Thames Valley University)
• Expanded Cinema in animation (Martina Bramkamp, Kingston University & London College of Communication)

• The Experimental Cross-over (James Snazell, Edge Hill University)


Documentary (Lecture Theatre)
- Chair: Bella Honess Roe, University of Surrey
• Who’s Out There: Halas, the Relevance of Oral Traditions and the Animated Documentary (Charles daCosta, SCAD)
• “Reenactment, the Fantasmatic, and the Animated Documentary” (Steve Fore, City University of Hong Kong)
• The Animated Documentary as Masking – When Exposure and Disguise Converge (Nea Erlich, University of Edinburgh)

• “I don't know anything about it”: Waltz With Bashir and Slaughterhouse-Five (Jeff Marker, Gainesville State College)

15.55 – 16.25 Coffee Break


16.25 – 17.25 Keynote – Paul Wells (Lecture Theatre) - Chair: Van Norris, University of Portsmouth

17.25 – 17.55 Closing remarks & goodbyes (Lecture Theatre)

Tom Walsh

Yeats, Joyce and Animation’s Field of Transformations.

Abstract: Through an analysis of Tim Booth’s short films, this paper will discuss the potential for the animated form to embody Keiji Nishitani’s ‘field of transformations’. His films The Prisoner (1983) and Ulys (2000), adaptations of Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Inisfree and Joyce’s Ulysses respectively, mark moments of rupture in Irish culture and identity, and through a use of the plasmatic animated image, describe both the animated text’s relationship to literary sources and the contingent nature of language, history and identity itself.

Biographical Statement:
Thomas Walsh graduated from the Diploma in Animation Production Course at Ballyfermot Senior College in 1994, and worked as a Special Effects artist for Screen Animation Ireland on the feature productions The Pebble and the Penguin (1994) and All Dogs go to Heaven II (1995), and afterwards for the Walt Disney Feature Animation Studio on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997) and Tarzan (1999). He has recently completed a PhD on the relationship between a contemporary Irish animation industry and postcolonialism at Loughborough University School of Art and Design, and has contributed an article on special effects animation in Paul Wells’ book Fundamentals of Animation (2006). Ongoing research creates critical linkages between animation practice and formations of national and personal identity arising from postcolonial studies.

He is currently a Senior Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Animation degree course at the Arts University College at Bournemouth in the UK.