Layers of looking

The films that I make are part documentary, part film essay, part visual poem. They are created out of a series of up to 30 drawings that are animated. The process from research to completion takes about 2 years, and at the end of it there is a film and a number of drawings that can be exhibited. This paper emerges out of the realisation that in the different stages of making a drawing and a film—from planning a drawing and seeking an image as a starting point through to the finished film being projected onto a screen in a gallery—I am looking at the image in different ways. There is a close-up kind of looking when I am drawing and a reflective kind of looking when I step back to take stock. There is a way of looking at darks and lights as they are built up that is different from the way of looking at the lines crossing the edges of the grid being used to transfer an image to the drawing paper. Seeing the drawings on the wall of my studio is different from seeing the same drawings in a museum setting.