Moore, S., 2017.

Animated Spaces: independent female animators and the spaces they work in

Using the author's 2004 film doubled up (itself based on Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document 1973-9) as a starting point, Animated Spaces looks at the ways that independent animation female directors carve out spaces to work in; both literal and figural.

Woolf argued in A Room of One's Own (6: 1928) 'a woman must have money and a room of one's own if she is to write fiction'. Money here represents power and freedom; an animator must have money, a commission (and she must be taken seriously as a director in order to get commissioned), child care and time (always time), as well as the elusive 'room'. The room is for many contemporary animators a snatched, repurposed area - the box room (Moore), an underused bathroom (Lizzy Hobbs), an attic space (Ellie Land). This paper will look at contemporary independent animation practice and how the spaces available to women animators affects the amount and type of animated work produced.

doubled up tackled the conundrum of physically managing the business of animating whilst mothering new born twins - at one stage the animating women has no space for anything other than the tasks of feeding, changing and soothing (fig. 1), later she is shoved into a small attic (fig. 2) before finally being allocated a room in the bottom right of the child's house (fig. 3).

Jane Austen famously described her own work as a 'little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour' (letter to her nephew, 1816) and as an independent animation director I wonder if the space I carve out to animate within affects the scale and scope of the work I produce. This paper will investigate this question using contemporary case studies and interviews.