Thinking about abstraction and simplicity

Over the summer I interned on a moving image production with Antony Barkworth-Knight for the Manchester Jazz Festival. From this collaboration I found that minimalism and abstraction of ideas to their most basic forms could be really captivating and beautiful. There was a mesmeric quality to some of the flowing lines and shapes which we animated and I loved the animated lines Antony created from a day of mark-making together using paint and graphite. Antony taught me that when you boiled everything down to line, shape and tone, it could be really exciting because then everything is about the movement, colour and texture of the image.


I made these samples when we first started talking about lines 'having a conversation', and then Antony animated some captivating sequences of squiggles/doodles/basic lines reacting to each other and developing. My later versions of the two lines 'dancing' which made it into the final show alongside other work like more figurative bird animations, is still something I'm really proud of and continues to be an idea I develop from. I keep coming back to this idea that moments of abstraction, rather than being fillers, act as palette cleansers. They keep you intrigued and focused, and I've found this across the board when dealing with narrative, not just in animation.