Haptic Animation Amplifier Fires up Local Film
Haptic Animation Amplifier publicly launched last month at Northwest Film Forum, before a retrospective of Seattle animation icon Bruce Bickford’s work during the Local Sightings festival. Tess Martin—who makes short animated films with paper cut-outs, ink, paint, sand and other objects—created the nonprofit to support Northwest animators and raise the profile of locally made animated film.
“There’s a beautiful rich history of interesting, personal artistic films,” says Martin, a story that gets lost in the world of studio animation. To start Haptic, Martin compiled an online database and timeline of every animated film made in the Northwest. It’s the sort of archive that makes films more accessible, simply because it lets people know where to look for them.
“Other countries have whole institutions for this,” she says.”They have a national archive that includes animation, and they have an archivist whose job it is to take care of things and get the facts straight.”
Haptic is a natural extension of Martin’s work with the Seattle Experimental Animation Team, an informal network of local independent animators. Shortly after she arrived in Seattle in 2008, Martin reached out to animator and SEAT founder Stefan Gruber, who invited her to join the group, whose members all share a nontraditional sensibility. SEAT puts on screenings of their work at the Zeitgeist Café in Pioneer Square; make collaborative, exquisite corpse-style films that build on one another’s work; apply for small grants and help each other on projects.
Martin wanted to bring Pacific Northwest animation, in all of its experimental glory, to a wider audience. In 2011 she curated an evening of animated shorts and booked a three-week trip to Europe, where she presented the program at various indie cinemas and arts centers. She created a second touring program, Strange Creatures, when readying to leave Seattle for a Master’s program in the Netherlands in 2013, taking with her to Europe work by Webster Crowell, Britta Johnson, Drew Christie, Clyde Peterson, Stefan Gruber and Bruce Bickford. While living abroad, Martin realized that Pacific Northwest animators are at a disadvantage in terms of resources, community and support.
“Generally speaking, in Europe there’s a lot more attention paid to animation history, and in some countries people really value it as a part of national cultural heritage,” Martin says. “But it isn’t celebrated, and there certainly isn’t funding for it, in the United States.”
The United States lacks festivals where animation and animators take center stage. Many American film festivals include animation, but few bring together animators from all over the world to network, share techniques and exchange ideas. Even if a PNW animator is accepted into an international festival, expense often prevents them from attending. Whereas in Europe, last-minute travel grants are sometimes available to filmmakers to remove that barrier to entry.
Because none of the big Pacific Northwest art schools offer an animation degree—classes focus mostly on commercial studio work—Haptic serves as a resource to help animators find and navigate opportunities. The website will have information about festivals, animation courses, local meet-ups, and artist residencies and graduate programs all over the world. It will curate more touring programs of PNW work and bring international animation to local screens. Further down the road, Martin hopes Haptic will be able to give out grants for the creation of new work and for attending animation residencies and launch a travel fund to get animators to far-flung festivals.
After showing Strange Creatures at a famous animation school in Hungary, which has an incredible tradition of animated film, one of the students told Martin, “The films seem very free.”
“Because there is no big school that’s training people all one way, people tend to try new things and find their own way here,” Martin says. “If you’re making work in places that do have this history, it can weigh on you and stop you from experimenting and trying something wacky,” she says, “which is definitely not an issue in the Northwest.”
The Man Who Shot The Man Who Shot Lincoln from Drew Christie on Vimeo.