Plagarise your memory

Last night I went to Clare Kitson’s presentation of films celebrating the launch of her book on the history of British animation since 1982. She was the commissioning editor for animation at Channel 4 from 1989 to 1999. Find out more about the book at the publisher’s website.

One of the films she showed was “Love is All” by Oliver Harrison, an animation inspired by the song as sung by Deanna Durbin in 1940. That reminded me of a TV advert he made based on his graduation film back in 1988.

In 2002 I wanted to get back into using Adobe After Effects as I hadn’t used it for a few months. I had recently heard a version of Noel Coward’s “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party” by The Divine Comedy, and vaguely remembered a typographic TV ad from some time in the 80s. I decided to make a typographic animation based on the song inspired by the ad.

At that point I might have been able to find a copy on YouTube. There are few visual references to it today, and I might have found some to base my animation on. I decided not to copy the ad, but copy my 13 year old memory of the ad. The advantage being that my memory would combine with my other experiences and interests over the intervening years to create something a little more original.

Here’s what I came up with:

Today I found a video with some excerpts from the original short film mixed in with some other stuff (somewhat spolit by it). There are no more exceprts after 1:30 –

Oliver’s typographic compositions are a lot more advanced than mine, but you can see how his ideas informed mine.

So if ‘immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,’ steal from your imperfect memories of other artists works.

Visit Oliver’s website to see what else he’s been doing over the last 20 years. When I find some video of his work, I’ll post links to it on this blog.