Animate Projects

A spirited young woman persuades a hyena from London Zoo to take her place at a dinner dance held in her honour. Their plan requires a surprising amount of artistry and violence.

A filmmaker captures images that characterize the violence and repression as well as the hope of rebirth and remembrance in northeastern Thailand.

Sir John Lubbock’s true story and his scientific writings on Ants, Bees & Wasps stood out as contemporary for the co-directors, Osbert Parker & Laurue Hill who worked in collaboration. Themes of cultural displacement, civilisations and environmental concerns were found in their interpretation of Lubbock’s story still relevant today. A diverse range of techniques from, stop-motion, 2D cut-out’s and digital animation is combined to tell a bizarre and beautiful love story with a sting in its tale.

“I don’t want to feel like it’s only me. I know it’s not only me, because there are others out there…” ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is a short visual essay film by artist animator, Jessica Ashman, about navigating the visual art and animation world as a black face in a white space. Using animation and recorded interviews of eight other women of colour artists, ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is an abstract confessional from the director herself: a visualisation of the joy, frustration, wishes and dreams of what it feels like to be a black women and a woman of colour artist, creating and existing.

An attempt to visualize higher dimensions and unearthliness, taking into account these concepts' heightened awareness, when attempting to process or predict the end of the world.

One day a humble fisherman catches an enchanted fish. Can the fish help him, and his wife improve their lot?

Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

Animated fabric brings the story of a lingerie factory in Manchester to life. Silk, cotton and lace go under the camera, as the workers recount the history of Headen & Quarmby, the UK garment manufacturing industry, and British family traditions of making. A specially composed soundtrack by Swedish composer Malin Bång, inspired by sounds of sewing machinery, evokes the ups and downs of the factory.

Winter bound, a snow queen dreams of love and the blooming of spring. Through frosted rococo cartouches she sings about the virtues of true love accompanied by miniature animated sequences.

Girls and eels compelled to revisit, re-experience and return.

A metal detectorist’s quest through the Shropshire Marshes leads us to a spectacular gold masterpiece, and the leader who sacrifices it for the sake of her child.

Didi moves into an unkempt house in Stoke-on-Trent. Whilst feeling ill at ease in this unfamiliar environment, she comes across a curious statue in the garden. This enchanting object helps Didi to appreciate the heritage of her new neighbourhood through an unexpected journey back in time.

Will Mr Christie allow Terry to join the Mayan End of the World Society?

Strangers ponder our attitudes towards death and dying – reflecting on how a conversation over tea and coffee at a ‘Death Cafe’ might make broaching the subject a little less terrifying.

A patch of land in Derby, UK, is adopted by an ex-NHS Psychiatric Nurse and transformed by a cyclical system of recovery. A poetic portrait of a place, the people who support it, and that it supports.