Making It Move: Animation with Andy McKeown
- Belle Vue Arts Festival
- Jun 4
- 3 min read
'So much fun'; 'the best time'; 'really, really good'. These were just some of the comments from Belle Vue Arts Festival committee members who were lucky enough to visit Andy McKeown's cavernous studio recently for a dry-run of the stop-animation sessions he is offering as part of this year's Festival. Perhaps best-known locally as the man behind the much-loved immersive digital lights installation 'Splinters of Heaven' at St Mary's Church and the huge projections of Charles Darwin onto the slab of Shrewsbury Market Hall, Andy has been animating since the age of nine.
'I pinched my dad's cine camera while he was away' he laughs. 'It had a single-frame shutter release, and I discovered I could take a frame at a time. In those days you had to send film away for processing. Two or three weeks later you'd get it back and find out whether what you'd filmed was any good.' What has changed since then is not the fundamentals of animation – they're exactly the same – but the technology. Working as an art teacher in 1983 'somebody waved a computer at me' says Andy 'and I got hooked. I couldn't do the coding at first so I got somebody to write what I needed so I could create pattern design separations for screen printing. I wasn't interested in it as a computer but as a processor, another palette to explore, really useful for students who weren't confident with drawing but could print.'
A growing realisation that computing could be used as an aid to animation gradually led to career change first working with Shropshire Advisory Service then setting up the company Wild Strawberry interactive multimedia Limited in 1995. ‘Much of my work since 1995 has involved animation both traditional stop motion and computer assisted and interactive animation' says Andy. 'But instead of me having to move every single frame myself, I program motion paths to move things. It speeds up the process and allows you to explore moving layers in real time. With my Aquarium animation, you can see through the fish as they go by, the layers interact with each other, and they affect the colours of things behind them, so you get this beautiful and unpredictable psychedelic surface.'
Festival-goers who would like to see the Aquarium in action can do so at the Arts Festival's Art Exhibition at Barnabas Church from 17th-20th June. The workshops Andy is running for children and young people as part of the Festival programme will be more traditional. 'It's a very quick introduction' says Andy. 'But you'll get going a lot faster if you come with ideas. Bring loads of stuff...small Lego bricks, toys, cut-outs from magazines, cut-out drawings – they don't have to be masterpieces. If you want to animate yourself, take a photograph of yourself and cut that up. We'll be doing top-down animation because it's the easiest form. You'll need a phone and you'll need to download the free Aardman Animate app, which is available for most phones and is simple to use. By the end, you should have at least 10-to-20 seconds of animation maybe more – animation is a slow process.'
And if you want to see what can be achieved by a bunch of complete novices in an introductory session, keep your eye on the window of the Living Room hairdressers on Greyfriars Bridge, where a montage of the committee's efforts from the dry-run workshop will be showing inside a picture frame designed by Andy. 'I'll put them all in and it will randomly play them' says Andy 'together with bits of my own stuff like a tiny Thomas the Tank Engine moving down a track. Really simple. I just thought, it's a nice way of starting it off. It gives the effect.'
Andy is planning to run a series of animation workshops for adults and children/young people during the summer. For more information, email andy@wildstrawberry.com and keep an eye on andy mckeown lightworks FaceBook and random_segment on instagram
You can find more information on the workshops Andy is running for the festival here.
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