Elisabeth Hobbs

Lines Fiction: I became very curious about your work, when I found out that you describe yourself as a traditional animator and Old School. What is your artistic conviction and how do you put it into practice?

Elisabeth Hobbs: I am an artist who works with animation under a rostrum camera using traditional materials such as ink and paint on paper. In my practice, a rostrum camera set up means a digital SLR on a copystand facing downwards towards the paper on the table, in a dark place, with four lights pointing at the page. Currently I use individual pieces of paper (around A6 or smaller) for each frame of animation, and I record the frame while the ink or paint is still wet on the image. I record 12 frames for each second of animation. The process is quite quick because I don’t want to dwell too much on the details in each image, but rather access the energy between one image and the next. I derive so much pleasure from seeing lines and colours brought to life through the process of frame by frame animation.
A big part of my process is reiteration. A sequence that might appear in one of my films will have been drawn anything between 4 and 10 times. I’ll try it many different ways and I try not to stop until it feels light, or efficient and I’ve found something that is surprising.

Lines Fiction: How important are drawing materials, pencil, ink, water colour, typewriter on paper, in connection with moving images for you?

Elisabeth Hobbs: The materials are really important. If I can, I like to connect the materials to the narrative or the theme and to introduce a limitation or challenge to guide the creation of the film.

I used butterfly prints to create my film Little Skipper, and the sound of the butterflies was created with the pages of the book on which the images are painted. I used a typewriter to make the film G-AAAH. The film is about Amy Johnson, who was a typist before she flew from the UK to Australia. To create I’m OK, which is about the artist Oskar Kokoschka, I used the paint and ink to express the drama of those few years of his life depicted in the film.

Lines Fiction: The creation process for The Old, Old, Very Old Man is particularly noteworthy; you draw each frame with blue ink on a single white tile. How long does this elaborate process take?

Elisabeth Hobbs: The Old, Old, Very Old Man was set in the time of King Charles I, and I wanted to create the whole film on a single bathroom tile with blue ink, as a tribute to the 17th Century Delft tile artists. The process was similar to my other films, I was drawing an image on the tile, taking a frame, erasing the image and drawing it again. The process isn’t very elaborate, especially if the colour and detail in the image is somehow limited, it makes the process simple, and allows for more time for reiterations.

Lines Fiction: You also work in a team for editing, sound design, and voices. Does teamwork influence your artistic work?

Elisabeth Hobbs: I have a consistent studio practice alongside my work as an educator and I have created shorter more experimental pieces like Little Skipper or G-AAAH on my own.

For the films that are more substantial, or involve a narrative like The Debutante, I am lucky enough to be able to collaborate with editor Mark Jenkins, composer Hutch Demouilpied, sound designer and actors and Animate Projects producer Abigail Addison who creates the opportunities for artists like me to have space and resources to make bigger pieces of work. The collaborations do influence the artistic work. Working with an editor is so exciting, Mark will find a rhythm and help to make sense of the images. We work with Hutch the composer from the very beginning and the sounds and instruments that she uses will be in the timeline when I’m animating, they immediately bring the marks to life, and the same with the voices and the sounds. It feels like such a privilege to be able to solve creative problems with friends and colleagues.

Lines Fiction: You take part in major film festivals and your animations are award-winning. How do you view your drawings that emerge during the creative process: Are they merely material, or do you also present them as independent works of art?

Elisabeth Hobbs: I wouldn’t show the drawings as independent works of art, but they might be interesting to other animators or artists when they’re exhibited together with the other frames in a sequence, and they demonstrate that the marks on an individual frame can be slight. People are often surprised how small they are in comparison to the projection of the films. In my new film Daughters of The Late Colonel, the images are as small as 6 x 4cm. The smaller the image, the cheaper it is, the quicker it is to draw, and it allows for less detail, which makes it more graphically interesting.

I’m not so worried about perfect animation, or the characters remaining on model throughout the film or beautiful backgrounds. I’m interested in retelling stories from an unusual perspective with minimal means, and I’m interested in how much you can convey dramatically with simple lines and unusual sounds. In that respect I’m so pleased to be a part of the animation community and to have the chance to add my particular voice to the rich mix.

Watch more animations by Elisabeth Hobbs under:
lizzyhobbs.co.uk