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FA7P42 - Notes on Carla MacKinnon’s An Approach to Authenticity Presentation at the RCA

Carla MacKinnon is a PhD candidate from the Arts University, Bournemouth. She held a presentation at the Royal College of Art. The presentation is about how to use stop-motion animation “to evoke physical and psychological experience in animated documentary. MacKinnon believes the presentation will help her “draw up a dossier.” She also discusses three of her previous projects.

MacKinnon graduated from her MA at the RCA. Her MA has allowed her to be more creative with real experiences that are “individual and subjective.” In comparison I feel that my MA at the London Metropolitan University has also allowed me to be more creative with my personal experiences in animated documentary form.

In terms of the evocative mode MacKinnon outlines in her presentation, the most evocative sense for me in my documentary is smell because that sense has brought me back bittersweet memories of my grandparents such as the smell of cigarette smoke reminding me of when my maternal grandmother passed away as a result of lung cancer and the smell of lavender reminding me of visiting my paternal grandparents when I was younger. While Honess Roe (2013: 15) suggests animation that functions in an evocative way “allows us to imagine the world from someone else’s perspective,” I use the evocative mode to allow people to imagine the world from my perspective.

MacKinnon’s stop-motion animation is combined with live-action footage and digital techniques. In my animated documentary, I traced over live-action footage to create rotoscoped animation and I used 2D digital animation to create shots such as the final underwater shot and a younger version of me sniffing lavender in my grandparents’ front garden. For the title cards that introduce each sense, I made collages from newspapers and magazines to represent each sense such as an eye, an ear, a finger touching a tablet, a nose and teeth biting into a bar of chocolate.

Sobchack (2004: 71) claims a film can be “an experience of touching, tasting and smelling it.” In terms of my documentary, I am considering adding a sensory dimension that includes luring audiences into the viewing area with garlic, chilli and pieces of cloth with lavender spray on them, ‘stage hands’ touching them unexpectedly and people crowding them.

MacKinnon’s MA graduation film was Devil In the Room (2013), an animated documentary that explores sleep paralysis or insomnia. She has taken inspiration from horror films. Her film has received mixed feedback. While some viewers have found her film frightening and unsettling, others have found it pleasurable. Those who have lived with sleep paralysis praised the horror film-influenced content “was really crucial to expressing the reality of their subjective experience.”

The short clip of the film MacKinnon shows in her presentation uses a stop-motion technique called pixilation, which involves a sequence of several photographs that are put together to create the illusion of animation. Another example of work that uses this technique is an advertisement for the footwear brand Sneux that depicts a young man using another as a skateboard. The advertisement was produced by PESfilm.

Also in the clip from MacKinnon’s film, a special effect that resembles blue smoke is superimposed over the footage. It uses sound effects and a narrative style that are typically present in the horror film genre.

MacKinnon put together an installation called Squeezed By Shadows to accompany Devil In the Room (2013, MacKinnon Works). She reworked interviews with people who have sleep paralysis and visual experiments into the installation. This part is inspirational for my immersive sensory screenings of my film.

One part of the installation is a booth with a peephole in it. MacKinnon shows some clips of what people can see when they look through the peephole. The clips consist of kaleidoscopic images and images that resemble psychological ink blot tests, better known as Rorschach tests. MacKinnon describes these images as “often intentionally difficult to decipher” Because the peephole is small, viewers are forced to move their eyes and heads in order to see the whole image. Also the sound in the gallery is dim and visitors had to strain to hear it. While most shots in my animated documentary are easy to look at, I have made some shots overwhelming to look at by filling them with duplicates of my relatives and several tracings of mobile phones. In terms of the sound while it is consistent for the most part I stopped the main music playing during the sound segment to replace it with other sound effects such as people talking loudly on their phones on the bus, multiple telephones ringing and a different piece of music of which I increased the volume to drown out my narration.

The next project MacKinnon discusses is called Out of Body. She made this project in collaboration with an electronic musician and composer known as Gazelle Twin and it is about Gazelle Twin’s traumatic experiences of puberty and adolescence (MacKinnon Works, c. 2016). MacKinnon used materials such as teeth, hair and meat to recreate realistic images of human organs and other parts of the body in order to “repulse and seduce” audiences. MacKinnon proceeds to show the trailer for the film. The trailer includes rather graphic close-ups of parts of the human body such as the heart, which reminds me of the close-up of my eyes in the opening shot of my animated documentary.

Gazelle Twin performed live music to accompany the screening of the film. She was dressed in a very concealed way.

MacKinnon is currently working on a film called Black Rain, which is about chronic pain.

To conclude, the most useful parts of MacKinnon’s work as inspiration for my project are the mixed-media technique in Devil In the Room, the viewing booth in Squeezed By Shadows and the close-ups of human body parts in the trailer for Out of Body.

Bibliography

Books

  • Honess Roe, A. (2013). Animated Documentary. New York: Palsgrave Macmillan.

  • Sobchack, V. (2014). Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press.

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