Short films – Katharine Seaton

Edgewise

Posted on September 4, 2022September 4, 2022 by Katie Seaton in animation, Methodology, Psychology, Scoring, Short films, Sociology, Sound design, Technique, Women in composing

My first attempt at making my own animation!

I love animation. I loved the drawn stop-motion animation Rosie Wyllie used in our Inscape films. I also can’t draw! So what can I do with a whiteboard and my very limited abilities as an artist?

The images for Edgewise came at the end of 2020 and far, far too many video calls – during which I became very accustomed to and very depleted by being talked over by other people.

There are fascinating things about exploring a new creative medium. There’s the freedom: “I can suck all I like at this and it doesn’t matter at all!” And there’s the discovery: “my hands have developed their own brain and are bypassing my plans as I go!”

The soundtrack was created by studying recordings and then imitating the speech of very confident or aggressive speakers, then mapping the speech patterns to midi. I used VariAudio in Cubase to do this second part, and it worked well. I mapped it onto a pretty basic and waffly-sounding patch and built the rest of the music around that.

Hope you enjoy!

International Women’s Day on Resonance FM 2021

Posted on March 9, 2021 by Katie Seaton in animation, Radio, Scoring, Short films, Sound design, Women in composing

For International Women’s Day, Jude Cowan Montague made a special edition of ‘The News Agents,’ sharing music by some long term members of the Women Composers Collective.

With pieces by Arhynn Descy, Kristen Baum Composer, Rosemary Duxbury composer, Jude Cowan Montague and me.

It included performances by cellists Jeness, playing Arhynn’s piece, and Emma Butterworth, also of the WCC, who played the cello on the score to ‘Roots’, my featured music.

Roots will be released this month, and I’m very excited! The picture accompanying this post is from the film.

Listen here!

https://www.mixcloud.com/…/the-news-agents-women…/

Roots!

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Katie Seaton in animation, Scoring, Short films, Sound design, Women in composing

Inscape Animations have made a trailer for the new film, Roots, a story of human connection and migration through time and distance.

Roots trailer

And we have started a Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/inscapeanimations

This is the very beginning of our journey as a production company.

We would love for you to join us on that journey. There will be a £1 per month tier coming very soon, as well as more in-depth discussion about Roots and the extensive research that our writer, Catherine, undertook over two years, to produce her remarkable poem-script.

I will also be posting some content that delves into Suspended.

Suspended at the Draw Art Fair

Posted on May 8, 2020 by Katie Seaton in animation, Scoring, Short films, Sound design, Video Art, Women in composing

We were very excited to learn that Suspended had won one of three Draw/Camberwell prizes and was to be exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery as part of the Draw Art Fair. Unfortunately, this had to be cancelled because of the pandemic, and is taking place on Instagram instead.

Here’s a link to the post showing Suspended

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Draw Art Fair London (@drawartfairlondon)

Inscape and Escape – link to Mixcloud edition

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Katie Seaton in Analysis, animation, Psychology, Radio, Reflective, Scoring, Short films, Sound design, Technique, Women in composing

The special programme aired on Resonance FM for International Women’s Day 2020 can be heard here. I talk to Rosie Wyllie and Catherine Henderson about the philosophy and techniques in the drawing and the soundtrack and we listen to excerpts from the film. The post of images accompanying the programme can be found here: https://katharineseaton.wordpress.com/2020/03/08/inscape-and-escape-discussion-on-the-making-of-suspended/

Review of Suspended

Posted on April 4, 2020 by Katie Seaton in animation, Short films

Francesco Bori of the Film Only Film Festival reviews Suspended.

This is a lovely review. Francesco really understood what we wanted to convey. All credit to the wonderful Rosie Wyllie, for making those images he so raved about. She is so very talented!

The festival site is here: https://www.francescobori.com/filmonlyfilm – a great event driven entirely by a sincere love of film.

Inscape and Escape – discussion on the making of Suspended

Posted on March 8, 2020 by Katie Seaton in Analysis, animation, Musical semiotics, Radio, Reflective, Scoring, Short films, Spirituality, Technique, Women in composing

Welcome…

… if you are with me to follow our discussions on Resonance FM’s International Women’s Day programming!

I’ll be around today for answering questions in the comments section here.

The numbers in brackets are times when we talk about the image you see, for those of you listening on Mixcloud.

And here is a link to Suspended. https://youtu.be/6b61EbMrido

Do also catch it at the Draw Art Fair in May! https://www.drawartfair.com/about

– Katie

William Kentridge (1:50)

William Kentridge: transformation with animation

Opening sequence … “its own, dream-like, reality …” (4:00)

“Sparse, shrunk-down to pain and black and white …” (5:25)

“… I always think of a sharp pain as a flash of white … vixen screams … tendril things …” (5:35 – 7:34)

[film’s narrator] … they started by hitting our feet with a stick, again and again…

“… ney flute … warm sheen … when the son is crossing the son is crossing the river …” (7:50 – 9:26)

… between our village and Lebanon there is only a river…

“virtual synth patch from the beeping alert [of the dialysis machine] … continual merging and changing … never a point of conclusion …” (10:05 – 11:04)

… my kidneys were starting to make me feel unwell…

“… the click click click sound – I was trying to compare it to an old fashioned shutter slide, as a new chapter begins …” (10:40 – 11:14)

… when my son returned to the army, the accused him of trying to avoid national service…

“… the piano was being a tolling bell quite a lot, going ‘dung dung dung’ in the low notes …” 🙂 (11:30 – 12:24)

…we were now in a war; unrest was everywhere…

“the main theme … derived from me trying to reflect … where Rosie’s drawing the dialysis machine with lots of wires and strings … that ‘stringy‘ tune, the twining, wind-y, rising and falling intervals of a 6th …” (12:25 – 14:05)

“… that’s not the sort of thing you normally get to do … to be able to generate the opportunities for the sound to tell the story … with the prison sequence, it’s so dark … but you can hear an awful lot of the prison …” (15:12 – 16:23)

“… [the kestrel sound] introduces a real note of panic … the whole feeling of fear comes across very strongly in that scene …” (16:45 – 17:05)

“… almost a kind of amnesia to the film, with these repeated sequences … the daughter at school, the son in prison … it feels like someone trying to grapple with different memories …” (18:50 – 19:55)

… we paid a bribe … (multiple repetitions of this image and phrase)

I wanted to make sure my daughter got an education. Now she speaks English. But she doesn’t teach me any!

… when I was a restaurant owner, I used to take a pot of coffee [around the village] … everyone knew me!

… being a stranger here is a rather bitter feeling…

“… a series of deliberately ambiguous sounds … the fact that he was living in both past and present at the same time … the sound of the pouring coffee became the rain in the gutter … the rain led to thunder, which turns out to be a bomb, so back in his memories in Syria again … one big plane of existence, nostalgia and present day suspended reality …” (19:55 – 20:25)

… would I go back to Syria? Under the current regime, absolutely not! But if the regime changed then, yes, I would return…

“… that British scene of people rushing past buried in their mobile phones … perhaps all our lives are suspended …!” (21:30)

“One of the most powerful bits is how long we sit on his face as he watches his son get hurt … I fade in a bit of the original speaker … it was such a sad room, there was so much heaviness … and I feel that comes across in that little snippet of audio …” (23:00 – 24:54)

… this was so very difficult … the hardest thing I have ever had to do…

“… the final sequence … in Rosie’s images and in the more emotional music than we’ve had, this is our – hopefully quite tactful – comment: we’re saying, “this is how we feel about it” …” (25:00 – 27:38)

Inscape and Escape on Resonance FM

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Katie Seaton in Analysis, animation, Musical semiotics, Radio, Reflective, Scoring, Short films, Sound design, Women in composing

I have some news!

The team who made Suspended, Rosie Wyllie, Catherine Henderson and me, have secured funding for a second film. We have decided to call our group Inscape, after Gerard Manley Hopkins. We think this reflects our specialism of exploring social themes through the subjective experience of the individual, using drawn stop-motion animation and immersive sound and music.

The film will be called Roots and will explore human migration from early history to the present day in a more holistic, poetical way.

Roots is due to release in the autumn. I will be blogging on my processes as I approach the soundtrack, but it is likely to use human voices – children to the elderly – in speech and song.

In the meanwhile, Resonance FM has programmed what looks like an exciting day of programmes this Sunday 8th March for International Women’s Day – and we are part of it!

We will be discussing the artistic and collaborative processes as we made Suspended – and Catherine’s cat, Dotty, made some valuable contributions to the discourse! Our programme is at 9-9.30am UTC, but will be available on Mixcloud afterwards if you’re not in the UK or if you like a lie-in on a Sunday!

Use these links to access this broadcast:

https://www.resonancefm.com/

https://www.facebook.com/events/182152949710713/