From autumn 2020 into spring 2021, we worked with Edinburgh College of Art’s animation department to explore how its archive could become a resource for new creative work. Supported by Creative Informatics’ Creative Horizon programme, the project combined film digitisation with an interactive animation studio for virtual and augmented reality.
ECA’s animation programme marked its thirtieth anniversary in 2020. Its archive held both student films and the physical objects used to make them, including puppets that had become too delicate to handle safely. Preserving that material meant finding ways to keep the films accessible and let people explore the puppets without damaging the originals.
We helped digitise student films held on ageing formats, including VHS and S-VHS, bringing work stored on older media into a digital form that could be accessed more readily.
Alongside that work, the project used 3D scanning and modelling to recreate puppets digitally. We developed the software for a virtual animator’s studio, available through Oculus VR and Magic Leap, where users could manipulate the digital puppets within a recreated studio space. This let people work with representations of fragile objects while leaving the physical archive protected.
The collaboration brought together our development team with Dr Nichola Dobson, Jared Taylor and ECA PhD researcher Calum Main. Calum, himself a stop-motion animator, contributed to capturing and preparing the puppet models, bringing an animator’s perspective to the digital recreation process. The work took place amid the practical constraints of lockdown, which affected access to the archive and the way the team could collaborate.
On 29 April 2021, Insurgent Studios and ECA Animation presented the project at the online Bringing Legacy to Life stop-motion conference. The session explored how animation archives could support future teaching and creative practice. Further research documented the process and considered its potential for teaching and planning animation shots.
The project showed how preserving an archive can also create opportunities to use it: revisiting earlier student work, exploring how it was made, and giving a new generation space to experiment.
Image: development views of the digital puppet and studio, reproduced from Animation Research Network Scotland’s project write-up.
Further reading: Creative Informatics’ 2021 annual report, pages 34–35 and the conference programme.