Hobart Hughes – Landscape Animation

John (alias Hobart) Hughes has offered Landscape Animation field trips to students at COFA over the past few years. The Description on the UNSW on-line Handbook reads:

Students will be taken through a range of workshops and animation techniques specifically designed to experience nature frame by frame.

Students will experience five days of animation in the landscape around historic Broken Hill. This unique approach to animation draws upon environmental sculpture as an aesthetic for animation using digital video. Each student will shoot edit and score their own digital animation in the Australian outback. Students will learn valuable skills in digital camcorder and digital editing as well as developing classic animation timing skills.

Here is an extract from a conversation we had in July this year, in which he explains what he means by ‘Landscape Animation’:

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LR I’ve read the blurb on landscape animation that’s on the website at Uni, and you described it as looking at the landscape frame by frame.

HH Yeah…but I don’t think it’s very satisfactory as an explanation… I just think it was one of those terms that needed to be invented to cover a range of things that were already existing.

LR So, landscape animation is a term you made up?

HH Yeah.

LR Yeah, because I’ve been searching, and I can’t find any other references to it.

HB No. It’s just something that I used as a convenience, really, to describe a range of methods , you know – timelapse, and stop-frame to some extent, but, but in particular timelapse – but that’s a technique, so, then I started to look at what I call sequence animation, um, so like you know, like objects, all, in a sequence, and because, you know because they’re natural objects…and they just seem to kind of

LR Like in shape or colour…

HH Yeah. Every round object was the first thing I did, in a junk heap at Flowler’s Gap. And then I was stop-framing rocks moving, stop-framing, kind of like, you know dirt, then sometimes just recording, you know, footprints in dust, and then, you know, the play of light, so you’re timelapsing light, and they all revolved around being outside, and the movement of light, or the movement of objects, and manipulating objects, or the traces left from manipulation, like walking across a dust – bit of ground, so, and they all seemed to relate to, um, land as opposed to studio interior. They seemed to be consistently about, um, place.

And nn..no actually, they weren’t all exterior anyway, I mean I was going and finding factory sites and old mine buildings, particularly on those trips, and it just seemed to click. It seemed to click, the idea – and also relating to landscape painting – and it seemed like an obvious reference, and so many people have done so many things, and there’d been enough material done.

I mean you could describe Koyanaquatsi as landscape animation.

And Paul’s work …(Paul Winkler). And I remember seeing a work of his in the Sydney Film Festival, it must have been in the late 70s, early 80s where he was timelapsing mud crabs…no, soldier crabs in the mud flat and he’d used the sound of a typewriter on top of them. And it was so perfect, and he’d put different things into this mangrove swamp, and did different timelapsing…you know, the tide coming up and down. And he’d made all these matte boxes, for producing work, and he was physically actually – this is – he was doing things, he was doing digital animation before he had a computer. And he was doing them by sliding these matte boxes, and like mattes in these matte boxes, across these kind of elaborately constructed matte sliding devices on a Bolex camera, and basically doing, you know, process work, that you’d do on a piece of digital software..eer…no-digitally.

And so, I think, I think that, like if you were going to, another, you know, marking things that made me think ‘landscape animation’ you know was all that huge body of material, and there’s, there’s untold amounts of people that are working in that…across those fields .

But, um, I think that having the digital domain, um, also had a huge impact. One, was like digital still cameras and the fact that you could could come up to 35mm resolution if you wanted to on a tiny little hand-held device, and process instantly so that it’s the fluidity of that process, um that just enabled, like, you know, a convenience of thought, to be able to, to be, being enacted in the landscape, and so…

LR to improvise…

HH It can improvise SO easily, and that fluidity just enabled kind of like, you know um, one to kind of like, you know, one to process stuff very quickly, and then you could experiment, without any regard for the amount of processing you’d have to do, or, or, it didn’t matter, you could go through and you could make, you know, five versions of something just for the hell of it, and it was so quick and deliberate and easy.

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Posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007