Edwin Rostron
About Sharing Animations
jump to: work&curatorial
Lines Fiction: How come that you started with the presentation of animations and experimental films on your website: Edge of Frame?
Edwin Rostron When I started the original Edge of Frame blog in 2013
I had wanted to do something like it for a long time. I had been making my own animation work for about 15 years by that point, and experimental animation had always felt like quite a marginalised and niche area of practice. There weren’t many organisations, writers or curators specifically focused on it. I felt frustrated by the lack of visibility and discussion around the area (as that was the kind of work I was making myself) and felt a real need for more writing about it, and more screenings of it.
2013 felt like a good moment for me to start something up for various reasons. I had gained a bit of experience writing about film and animation through various jobs I’d had up to then. I had been making and showing work for a while so was already in contact with a number of other animators. And at that time there seemed to be more and more contemporary animators uploading their work to Vimeo, so it seemed like a good time to be able to see new work and share it online. (This was in the days when Vimeo was a much more functional and positive platform for independent filmmakers to be on than it is now, sadly!)
Lines Fiction: Who are you addressing with your project Edge of Frame, and how did the project develop over time?
Edwin Rostron Once I started the blog it became obvious there was a keen audience for it. I wanted it to be in-depth and useful as a resource – for artists, students, writers, curators – with something for people at all stages of understanding or experience. I also wanted it to be really accessible and not academic in the way it was written or presented. It has been used a lot by animation students but also cited in a number of academic papers and books about animation. And of course all kinds of different animators find a lot in it of interest too. I feel like these different ways it has been used means I have succeeded in creating something useful and accessible.
It has also put me in touch with lots of other animators all around the world. For me personally I think the sense of community it has generated has been the best thing about doing it. A few years after I started the blog I began putting Edge of Frame screenings on, and these became focal points for animators to gather and meet offline. Through running Edge of Frame I was asked to do some animation programming for other organisations and festivals such as Flatpack and London International Animation Festival, and I think it was a definite factor in my being asked to teach at the Royal College of Art too.
It has been a really positive experience but between 2016-18 I took on way too much too quickly – organising lots of screenings and events, writing the blog, continuing my own animation practice, teaching and also working another part time job. I kind of burnt out and had to scale back my Edge of Frame activities quite a bit. The good thing is that I have always felt the freedom to do it in exactly the way I wanted to at any given point, so when I have wanted to scale it back I have – and I even stopped it completely in 2022 for a year or so.
Last year I re-started the blog as a Substack and resumed programming Edge of Frame screenings for LIAF. I also started a new irregular screening event called ‘Collision’ which has had a really positive response. I have always done Edge of Frame entirely on my own terms, which is very important to me, as it is with my animation practice.
Lines Fiction: Moving images are indispensable in our digital life. Do you think that hand drawn animation and experimental film get a fare share of attention in the art world by now?
Edwin Rostron I have shown sporadically in gallery exhibitions over the years and will have a solo show in Sweden next year, but on the whole I would say hand drawn animation is not so well represented in galleries – though I only really know about the situation here in the UK. There never has been all that much attention given to artists’ animation work but it has got quite a bit worse over the last 10 years – especially for moving image artists. in the UK a lot of the small or medium sized galleries or organisations who might once have supported or shown some experimental animation have closed down due to financial pressures. I can understand there are issues from a commercial gallery’s point of view – artists who make films don’t bring in a lot of money for a gallery as films are very hard to sell! So I think having a multi-faceted, expanded animation practice can put you in a better position to be shown in galleries. But it feels like it’s probably harder than it has been for quite a while – though not completely impossible.
Lines Fiction: What are your thoughts on websites presenting free content, in contrast to subscription based offers?
Edwin Rostron Edge of Frame was a free blog between 2013-2022. But over the years I became much busier and the blog invariably got pushed to the bottom the list of things I had to do. The time between posts got longer and longer and then in 2022 I stopped doing it altogether. At the end of 2024 I decided to start it up again but as a Substack with a partly-paid for subscription element. The only way I could really make the time for it was to have it generate some income.
I was always very happy for it to be free – of course I wanted it to be completely accessible to all – but now I do question that model a bit when I look at the wider societal / cultural consequences of a desire for unlimited ‘free content’. When I look at the damage Spotify has done to the music industry, the debasement of all forms of culture as a result of prioritising convenience so highly – I think we just end up paying in a much worse way. But I do have mixed feelings about it all of course.
Edwin Rostron – Work & Curatorial
Lines Fiction: On this site we are pleased to present two of your recent animations, Help Desk and Night Music. For your moving images, do you work purely with pencil on paper using a rostrum camera? Or do you also use one of the digital animation programs for implementation?
Edwin Rostron For most of my recent films I draw with pencil on paper, using a lightbox. Then I scan the drawings in and assemble them into animation sequences in After Effects. Once they are in After Effects I will treat the drawings with some simple functions such as altering the tonal range and colour, quite often making the texture of the paper much more visible and defined. Sometimes I also colour selected areas of the individual drawings in Photoshop. Over the years I have worked in a few different ways. My first films (in the late 1990s) were all shot on 16mm film using a rostrum, animating “under the camera”. I have sometimes worked that way digitally too. I also make very rough, very short experiments with the Stop Motion Studio app on my phone, many of which feature in a longer work I made over the pandemic, entitled Fragments. But most of my films tend to be scanned pencil drawings assembled and coloured or treated a bit in After Effects or Photoshop.
Lines Fiction: I was thinking about AI – does it affect your work / do you use it / do you encounter AI driven work by other artists in your project?
Edwin Rostron I don’t really have anything interesting to say about AI. I don’t use it in my work and don’t know any more about it than anyone else probably. The costs of its wider use en masse – to the environment, to society – seem really depressing and dangerous. As do the people and companies spearheading its use. Of course artists can use it in interesting ways – as they can with literally any tool – so I would look at any artist or work using AI on its own merits. But for me personally as an artist it’s of no interest at all. I think a pencil is more than enough to be going on with!
Lines Fiction: Your curatorial practise in exhibition spaces and for film festivals is an important aspect of your artistic work. In 2026 you curated the programme „Train of Thought: Experimental Animations from the RCA Archive“ at the 64. Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan. How is your experience with this offline form of presentation?
Edwin Rostron I have been curating screenings of experimental animation for about 10 years now. I have put on my own Edge of Frame screenings and larger events such as the two Edge of Frame Weekends (in 2016 and 2018) which were essentially like festivals with multiple screenings and talks taking place at different venues over a weekend. I have curated Edge of Frame programmes for London International Animation Festival each year also (between 2-4 each year). The Ann Arbor screening of RCA work was different as I was invited to select the films but did not do any of the organisation – which was very nice! But usually I am doing everything from choosing the films, to dealing with filmmakers and distributors and the venue and projectionist, and then presenting the screening. It can be a lot of work but I enjoy it a great deal – it satisfies the same urge in me that I had to make mixtapes for family and friends when I was younger. Selecting a programme of films is a creative work in itself but I think I generally have a different approach to professional curators – I am doing it in a more personal and instinctive way perhaps.
I think it is really important to have physical screenings of experimental animation happening in ‘the real world’ (i.e offline) for many reasons – its a completely different experience to see and hear films in a cinema with good projection and sound, as opposed to at home on a computer or tv. Some films – especially many experimental works – really need to be seen this way to be fully experienced. Also the opportunity to see works with other people in the same space is important and valuable, and for animators to meet and connect with other animators, filmmakers and artists in person is increasingly rare nowadays and more important than ever. Screenings that are not part of festivals have much to offer too, being less hyped up and more low key, with a greater emphasis on community and less about competition. I love festivals and they are obviously hugely important but smaller non-festival animation screenings are less common than they once were. It can be a really rewarding and beneficial experience to organise a screening – although quite a bit of work – and I would encourage more animators to give it a try.