IN CONVERSATION: CAROLINE LEAF

DIRECT ANIMATION - A PERSONAL VISION

„The nature of our work comes from who we are, the strengths and limitations of our personalities, and the times we live in. I will try to put my approach to animation and what I achieved into a context of who I am shaped by the values of my environment.“ — Caroline Leaf

This talk will be followed by an interview with Daniela Ingruber and the unique opportunity to be in conversation with Caroline Leaf – a pioneer and master of sand animation, paint-on-glass, and scratch-on-70mm.

Caroline Leaf’s animated storytelling films are renowned for their emotional content and graphic style, closely tied to the innovative direct animation techniques she developed. Her first film, Sand or Peter and the Wolf, was made with a bucket of local beach sand poured out onto a lightbox and lit from below to create a world of moving shadowy figures. Her subsequent films are refinements and extensions of this straight-ahead under-the-camera technique. She worked at the National Film Board of Canada and now lives in London, UK, where she maintains a studio working as a fine arts painter in oils, watercolour and mixed media. She is also an animation tutor at the National Film and Television School.