Frontiers of Animation #4

Aimée de Jongh: Immersive storytelling with camera movements in comics and animation.

In recent years, the comic book form has made an incredible evolution. The popularity of “graphic novels” and “graphic journalism” are examples of this new mature phase of the comics art form, making it a medium with an incredibly high level of immersion. Interestingly, the visual rules used in cinema also apply to comics. Various comic creators are very aware of this fact. They draw comics with cinematic techniques that are originally developed for film, to create a more immersive way of storytelling.

In this lecture, award-winning graphic novel author and animator Aimée de Jongh will dive into the art of storytelling in comics. By looking at cinematic techniques in film and animation, like camera movement, zooming and pacing, she will explore how to make better comic pages, and how to create a visual work that transcends the borders of the page.

Alice Saey: Animation, music and the art of immersive storytelling.

In today’s film festival circuit, music videos can suffer from a certain misunderstanding: selected as commissioned works, they are assumed to be a commercial, non-narrative side step in a filmmaker’s oeuvre.

Ironically, the medium has for long been a terrain for filmmakers to experiment and develop a personal voice. Just like short films, they run on tiny budgets, can be self-initiated and meaningful.

Alice Saey began making music videos after graduating from a graphic design master, as a way to explore storytelling. She found in the medium the perfect terrain to develop narratives, based on immersive visual experiences.

In this lecture she will share the creative process of her two music videos Happy and Careful, discuss the implications of working with pre-existing music and the use of graphic frameworks to poetically tell stories.

Biography, Aimée de Jongh

Dutch comic author and animator Aimée de Jongh (1988) published her first comic book at the age of 17, influenced by Japanese and European comics. Because there was no academy that specialized in comic making, she studied Animation at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, KASK in Ghent and Gobelins in Paris. After graduation, Aimée started a very successful career in animation, working for various feature films and companies like Amazon Prime. Still, her biggest love remained comics. For five years, she drew a popular daily comic series called “Snippers”. In 2014, she made her debut graphic novel, “The Return of the Honey Buzzard”, while working on an animation project in Los Angeles. This book was an unexpected success, achieving translations in many different languages, reprints, and a live action movie adaptation. The success made it possible for Aimée to work on new comic projects like “Taxi!” and “Blossoms in Autumn”, written by scenarist Zidrou. This book won awards in the Netherlands, Belgium and Japan. Aimée is now working fulltime as a comic book artist, and teaches drawing and storytelling classes in academies all over the world.