Tag Archives for digital

Celebrating Black History Month: ‘Black Enuf*’ by Carrie Hawks

Still from the ‘black enuf*’ trailer

Carrie Hawks‘ (they/them) is a gender non-conforming artist, designer, animator and filmmaker based in New York, US. They work with a wide span of media and methods of making such as performance, doll-making, drawing, animation, motion graphic design and multimedia design.

Hawks’ film titled ‘Black Enuf*’ explores expanding Black identity by interweaving personal stories from their great grandmother’s autobiography, interviews with friends and family, and hand-drawn visualisations of their own memories. The 22 minute film offers a mix of media and is experimental in style; it uses hand-drawn elements alongside scanned textures and digital artwork.

Hawks summaries the film as follows : ‘A queer oddball seeks approval from Black peers despite a serious lack of Hip-Hop credentials’ (via).

Watch the trailer:

Rent (£3.04) or buy (£5.17) the film on vimeo.

Visit Carrie’s studio virtually:

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Crowd funding ‘The Last 40 Miles’, a film by Alex Hannaford

Although not claiming to be an animated documentary The Last 40 Miles, ‘a short animated film about life, death and compassion’, is based on a true story. The mixed media animation refers to the real life narrative of a death row inmate whom Alex Hannaford, writer and director, came across while working as a journalist covering the Texas prison system.

Not yet completed, the filmmakers have chosen to use crowd funding to raise the rest of the capital they need to pay the production costs. Crowd funding has become an integral resource for contemporary independent filmmaking. Although not a new phenomenon, the advent of social media and specially designed sights has lead to greater numbers of productions choosing this root.

Often such campaigns offer rewards in exchange for donations, the highest levels of philanthropy resulting in a credit as executive producer. Follow the link below to see how the team have used a short video to pitch to potential donators. Indiegogo, the fundraising platform also allows us to observe their progress.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-last-40-miles?c=home

‘February’ from 365 Days by the Brothers McLeod

365 – February from The Brothers McLeod on Vimeo.

Might be pushing it a bit here, but the makers describe their project to make 1 second of animation a day, every day of 2013, thus:

‘Some of the days are things that happened, others are things that have been fired off in our imaginations, and some are inspired by other people – particularly music or sounds given to us by our collaborators’.

So on the basis that some of what you see here is autobiography, of a sort, enjoy!