Grainger Re-Animated: VCA student creativity based on Grainger Museum exhibition

Victorian College of the Arts Fine Arts students have created engaging animations using the Grainger Museum collection.

Early in semester one 2017, the first-year cohort of eleven Bachelor of Fine Arts Animation students at the VCA explored the history of animation inventions, and more generally the role and impact of inventions and their inventors in shaping cultures, stories and artworks. In this context, they visited the Grainger Museum for an insight into the inventiveness and actual inventions proposed, developed or instigated by Percy Grainger.

The animators spent two other longer visits to the museum choosing various views and images from within the museum to inform and develop their sketching practice. In second semester the students imparted their impressions and twenty first century perspectives in bringing to life historic artefacts through various animation and film techniques. They have created animations based on photographs in the Grainger Photographed exhibition.

One key photograph was digitally split into separate planes or ‘layers’ in order to create various spatial illusions. These effects are often referred to as “multiplane”, “2.5d” and “parallax effects”. The students also incorporated their own animation content and additional photographic portraits from the Grainger Photographed exhibition.  The brilliant animation responses can be seen online through Vimeo.