âCraftâ appears to have a straightforward meaning, but it is a term that is rich in historical and cultural connotations. It can be taken simply to mean the doing or making of something, often directly linked to the idea of manual activity, or doing something with oneâs hands. There are of course more complex ways in which âcraftâ can be understoodânot least the way in which it is mobilised in the title of this book: The Crafty Animator. âCraftyâ on one level suggests misdirection or deception and this connects us to a rich history of magic , witchcraft , sleight of hand and prestidigitation. If someone is being âcraftyâ, then, they are not only âcraftingâ something, they are doing so with a view to deceiving or misdirecting.
Central to such connotations is a paradox that underpins much animationâespecially the forms of animation that are discussed in this collection of essaysânamely, that it simultaneously reveals and conceals its own construction. Peter Lamontâs contention, in his discussion of magic , is that âif you look for the wires and see them, that is bad magicâ (2009, 30), but there are many examples of animation that are based on a knowing revelation of the processes, the craft, that went into making it. Animation that âshows us the wiresâ, or revels in engaging the audience through a self-conscious disclosure of (parts of) the technique as part of its appeal. This does not mean that every animation mechanically talks us through âhow it was madeâ, but rather that the âhand of the artist â, whether explicitly and literally shown or merely implied, is often fundamental to the form.
The idea that something is crafted or handmade initially appears to be straightforward, therefore, but on further reflection we can see that it raises a number of paradoxes. Perhaps the most prominent of these is that such a handmade object is in some way authentic. Recently, craft has become an increasingly valued phenomenon in contemporary culture, precisely because of its perceived authenticity and connections to the âhandmadeâ. At the same time, however, this notion of the âhandmadeâ, the âauthenticâ, is used as part of the marketing of products sold by major corporations. One has only to walk down a high street to see signs for handcrafted burgers, handcrafted coffee, or craft beer, or to look online at a website such as Etsy where you can buy âunique, vintage & handmade itemsâ (Etsy 2018). At the time of writing both the Festival of Making and London Craft Week are imminent, and University College London (UCL) have set up the Institute of Making, a research hub for those interested in making. Crafted and handmade products are currently in vogue, then, and ironically are often marketed in ways that emphasises their uniqueness or authenticity . Herein lies the first of many contradictions that craft embodies in late-capitalist culture: namely, that its usefulness as a marketing term stems from how it brands things as unique and handmadeâauthenticâbut at the same time, the relentless march of a culture of mass consumption mitigates against anything being truly authentic. âHandcrafted â, âhandmadeâ, and other such terms, have simply become shorthand for a certain type of commodified âauthenticâ experience. The original meaning of the termsâto make something, something unique, with oneâs handsâhas become co-opted in order to re-brand certain products and experiences to make them seem more attractive in the highly competitive market-place. For example, a âhandcrafted â coffee from the Costa coffee chainâat the time of writing, a subsidiary of the hospitality multinational, Whitbread, and about to be acquired by Coca-Cola for ÂŁ3.9 billion 1 âis made by both barista and machine. The coffee will be the same if you were to buy one from any Costa coffee outlet because it is made by the same model of machine with the same coffee beans, bought in massive amounts by the company. Yet coffee sold in any of these outlets (and other chains, whether Starbucks or McDonalds) will emphasise the role of the barista in making the drink âby handâ. Of course, the barista may also âcraftâ their own touches to the final coffee by creating their own handmade sprinkled chocolate design, for example. In such an instance, which is of course an example of mainstream large-scale business practice, the final product is both the consequence of a factory line of coffee production and a human handmade input. More than this, the machine of course cannot be operated without human interaction. This may seem a whimsical analogy, but it can provide a useful introduction to thinking through craftâs relationship with animation. In the coffee example we are dealing with one personâs interaction with one piece of technology , the outcome of which is one cup of âhandcrafted â coffee. When it comes to animation, the array of technologies available to produce it is vast and varied. If we were to replace the one coffee machine with the wide range of technologies and techniques that animators useâadding the fact that they work in a wide variety of different industry contexts from the independent to the mainstreamâwe are immediately faced with a very complex set of relationships between that which can be directly linked to a human hand and that which is mediated in some way by technology , digital or otherwise. All of these contextual factors make identifying and understanding notions of craft all the more difficult to manage.
The aim of this book is to interrogate craft, and its contradictions, in the particular context of animation production. Surprisingly animationâs specific relationship to notions of craft has been largely overlooked in the scholarship. On the one hand, some animation might be unproblematically seen to be crafted or handmade, particularly in the sphere of independent production where individuals appear to simply draw, paint, or sculpt their productions into life. For example, one can look at the films of animators like Joanna Quinn, Adam Elliot, Caroline Leaf, or the Quay Brothers and sense the tactile, material nature of the images. The issue is complicated when one starts to consider how individual handmade practices intersect with technologies. Perhaps the thorniest issue that animation and craft-based practices highlight is the use of digital technologies, and the implications in terms of authorship and creativity. Digital hardware and software are of course almost ubiquitous in the production of all types of animation. âCGI â (âcomputer-generated imageryâ) is merely the most obvious use, and drawn/2D animation and stop-motion animation also use software such as ToonBoom, CelAction, TVPaint, Stop Motion Pro or Dragonframe in their production pipelines, but often in ways that will foreground the craft-based elements of the animation. For example, Aardmanâs productions are highly valued in contemporary culture for their use of stop-motion puppets that often retain thumb or finger prints, apparently providing âevidenceâ of their handmade production, despite the fact that Aardman, like all contemporary studios, of course use state-of-the-art technology to produce their animations. If there is one underlying, central aim of this book, it is to problematise these simplistic ideas about the value of certain methods and techniques, and how technology relates to them. Animators in all kinds of industries or production contexts use a wide variety of handmade/craft processes, as well as technological practices; there can therefore be no simple distinction in animation production between that which has been crafted by hand and that which has been crafted using technology .
One of the key arguments returned to repeatedly in the chapters that follow is concerned with the ways in which different types of animation foreground or self-consciously showcase notions of the (hand)crafted. Artworks self-reflexively gesturing to their constructedness, or the processes that went into their making is an old idea; the debates in this book, specifically about handcraft and animation, need to be seen in this larger context. For example, the metatheatrical tropes we can see in drama from Ancient Greece onwardsâdirect address of the audience, for instanceâare part of a mode of address that draws attention to the work as a consciously constructed (or crafted) artefact. The playwright (and the performers) want the audience to recognise and revel in the fact that they are engaging with something that oscillates between âshowingâ and âtellingâ. Film and literature have similar conventions, where the âdrawing attention toâ is part of the pleasure derived. In a brilliant video essay, âEditing as Punctuation in Filmâ (2015), Max Tohline draws upon a brief essay by Kathryn Schulz (âThe Five Best Punctuation Marks in Literatureâ from 2014) in order to discuss the often startling ways in which writers and filmmakers draw attention to the mechanics of their chosen medium. 2
Schulz offers up five punctuation marks that she argues arrest the reader, stops them dead, makes them starkly aware of the hand of the author leading them through the prose (or, in the case of one of her examples, from T.S. Eliotâs âThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrockâ, poetry). The fifth such mark is a simple full stop (or âperiodâ) from Primo Leviâs book, The Periodic Table. Levi ends the book with the chapter entitled âCarbonâ, and he ends that chapter with these lines:
It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.
This is the writer writing about the process of writingânot in a âhow toâ type way: in that sense âprocessâ is the wrong word here. It is the writer writing about the act of writing, the craft of writing, and the craft of writing as something that is not done invisibly and intuitively, but as a knowingâcraftyâcraft.
Similar questions of self-referentiality are commonplace in cultural historyâthe idea of mise en abyme and the recursive nature of certain artworks and artefacts, reflecting âbackâ on themselves, for example. But what can appear to be a purely textual âtrickâ actually speaks volumes about the processes that went into its construction: in other words, it is really pointing to the crafting hand of the maker and the powerful charge that recognition of this gives to the viewer. Take animator-artist Joe Sheehanâs work, for example: his most recent completed project, Unit 119, takes stop-frame animation to one of its outer edges and contemplates (virtual) stillness via animation and the handcrafting of miniature versions of the eponymous studio unit in which he is working. In the tradition of artists such as Thomas Demand, Jonas Dahlberg, and Mayumi Terada, Sheehanâs miniaturised replicas are exquisitely detailed, yet just stylised and simplified enough to make the viewer (un?)comfortably aware of the hand of the creator-animator. It is a peculiar form of experimental âanti-animationâ which, as Peter Parr notes âcreates an atmosphere that demands a deeply meditative participation from you, the viewer. Animation is experienced only when we engage and recognize the renewing qualities of stillness found in everyday subjectsâ (2016, 234).
The notion of careful or heightened attention to the artwork in question involves a noticing of details and nuances that might otherwise go unnoticed, as well as recognising the crafted nature of what we are looking at. Such attention to âcraftyâ sleight of hand which reveals and conceals simultaneously can again be linked to the idea of magic . The dialectical relationship between the âmagicâ of the animated (or, by extension, any moving) image and the âmechanicsâ of showing how it is done or how it is crafted is something addressed by a range of scholars from Tom Gunningâs influential âcinema of attractionsâ thesis onwards. Colin Williamson talks about the âcomplementarity of trickery and demystificationâ (2015, 9) that underpins the audienceâs paradoxical relationship with the magic of the moving image. Gunning refers to this by saying that the viewerâs rea...