An audiovisual short animation film, influenced by surrealist psychic automatism

Abstract

This research project is a result of wanting to pursue personal interests and to gain more expertise and knowledge in the fields of animation and film. These interests were approached through the perspective of psychic automatism as the core bases for the creation of a short film. More specifically automatic drawings underline the means through which the visual library for the animated short film was accumulated and progressively built upon throughout the production. The animation ultimately served as exploratory medium through which one could delve further into the Surrealist agenda of Automatism and as means to explore and represent the contradictions between self and public, conscious and unconscious. In the paper I go over the design process, from the research stage up to the production and finalizing stages, noting information pertinent to the development of the animation in between. None of the research methods employed were of any ethical concern, as the main method of research was done through reviewing of relevant literature and self-experimentation. The result of this design process is an approximately 2 minutes long animation combining traditional animation with 3D elements, through which I gained a deeper appreciation and understanding of the innerworkings of animation and the Surrealism movement. Although animation as a medium has been explored countless times already, I hope that this work serves to provide a new perspective into Psychic automatism.