Paula Lindo – Our histories, stories, present, future.

Body- and face-paint are a familiar sight during Carnival and related activities, but with the addition of film and a lot of patience, they can also be used to create beautiful animations.

During this year’s Animae Caribe (AC) Animation and Digital Media Festival, London-based artist Emma Allen demonstrated how to create timelapse body paint animated short films.

Two sessions were held on October 26 and 27, where Allen painted volunteers and showed attendees how to paint sugar skulls and zombie masks, which were particularly apt considering Halloween and the Day of the Dead were coming up.
At the beginning of the session, Allen showed two of her completed short films, Blink and Ruby. She went through the process of making Ruby, which was one minute long. “It’s made using stop-frame animation which is lots of photos with the tiniest movement in each one. It consists of 750 paintings and took five days to shoot, after which it went into editing and music, so it’s quite a labour-intensive passion.” Blink shows a caterpillar crawling across Allen’s face and then turning into a butterfly, which she did as part of a competition.
Allen said she also works with other animators who incorporate their work with hers, which is the premise of an unfinished film she made using six repeating frames of members of the public. The fourth film she showed, which was also unfinished, took 1,500 photographs to complete and was about evolution and the journey people are on to becoming more digital.
The attendees at the second session, which was held at the Drawing Studio at the Department of Creative and Festival Arts, Gordon Street, were then shown how to create time lapse animations and movement pictures of the masks they painted. Allen said she also uses her body-painting skills for art therapy for cancer patients and others. One volunteer had a butterfly painted on the back of her head.
She credits her mother with giving her the idea for making animations. “I started in art and then moved into animating, just by experimenting. I was painting my legs once with crocodiles and my mom said they could be animations, and so I started experimenting with it and that’s how it grew. I always thank my mom for the inspiration to get into animations and she always says I totally misunderstood what she meant. It’s taken me on this journey which has brought me here.”
Allen described her work as “a labour of love or madness as it takes a long time to get movement right. That’s why I do a lot of them on myself because it’s hard to ask someone to sit still for that long.”
More of Allen’s work can be found at http://www.emmaallen.org/ and on YouTube. Pictures of the sessions can be found on the ANIMAE CARIBE ANIMATION FESTIVAL Facebook page.