Joan C. Gratz | |
---|---|
Born | 1941 (age 81–82) |
Occupation(s) | Artist, Animator, Film director, Producer |
Known for | Animation pioneer with technique in claypainting |
Joan Carol Gratz (born 1941) is an American artist, animator, and filmmaker who specializes in clay painting. Gratz is best known for her 1992 Oscar-winning animated short film Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase . [1]
In 1941, Gratz was born in Burbank, California. Gratz's father was an electrical engineer and her mother was an English teacher. From a young age she had an interest in art.
While Gratz was a student in architecture, she began painting. Gratz was filming her painting process. In 1969, Gratz obtained a degree in professional architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. [2] Before graduating, Gratz began to experiment with the possibilities of animation and started to explore the idea of "making paintings breathe" with a technique she explained as "clay painting". After graduating, she moved to Oregon, making a living by creating puppets and poster graphics. [1]
In 1976, Gratz was asked to work for Will Vinton in the new up and coming Will Vinton Studios, [1] and began working in the film industry during the production of Rip Van Winkle (1978). [3] During her time at Vinton Studios, Gratz worked on many films as an animator, but in 1987 she decided to work as a freelance animator and filmmaker due to issues involved with collaborative film projects, and not receiving the proper credit for her work. [1] In 1987, Gratz established Gratzfilm, her own studio to direct and produce her films. [2]
Once a freelance animator and filmmaker, Gratz continued to be represented by Vinton Studio, [1] and her success led her to receive commissions for commercials from large companies such as Coca-Cola. [4] In 1990, Gratz animated a commercial for United Airlines entitled Natural, which consisted of her clay painting technique. [3]
After eight years of planning and researching, and two years of working through the creation and animation process, Gratz completed her film Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase in 1992. [5] The title of this seven minute long film [6] combines the titles of Leonardo DaVinci's famous painting, the Mona Lisa (1503), and Marcel Duchamp's iconic modernist piece, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1919). [7] [5] Consisting of fifty-five [5] twentieth-century paintings, Gratz uses her clay painting technique to present her audience with the history and evolution of modern art, [8] beginning with Impressionism, and continuing until the Pop Art movement and Hyperrealism [5] through metamorphic transitions between each work of art. [1] The sound and music for the film were provided by composer Jamie Haggerty and Chel White. [5] It won the 1992 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, [5] and won many other awards at various film festivals around the world. [4]
In 1993, Gratz co-directed and animated Pro and Con with Joanne Priestly. [1] Using mixed media including writing and calligraphy, and creating through black clay on white backgrounds, Pro and Con illustrates a docudrama about prison life seen through the eyes of a prisoner and a corrections officer. [1]
Gratz is also an author. In June 2014, Gratz was a writer and illustrator of My Tesla: A love story of a mouse and her car, a disguised children book for adults. [9] [10]
At the Academy Awards, Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase (1992) won an Oscar for the Best Animated Short Film in 1993. [11] [4]
Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints or plasticine figures are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation. Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation. Stop motion of flat materials such as paper, fabrics or photographs is usually called cutout animation.
Richard Edmund Williams was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, director, and writer. A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), for which he won two Academy Awards, and for his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler (1993). His work on the short film A Christmas Carol (1971) earned him his first Academy Award. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade and the intros of the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films. In 2002 he published The Animator's Survival Kit, an authoritative manual of animation methods and techniques, which has since been turned into a 16-DVD box set as well as an iOS app. From 2008 he worked as artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, and in 2015 he received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the best animated short category for his short film Prologue.
Pixilation is a stop motion technique in which live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor becomes a kind of living stop-motion puppet. This technique is often used as a way to blend live actors with animated ones in a movie, such as in The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb by the Bolex Brothers.
William Gale Vinton was an American animator and filmmaker. Vinton was best known for his Claymation work, alongside creating iconic characters such as The California Raisins. He won an Oscar for his work alongside several Emmy Awards and Clio Awards for his studio's work.
Claymation or clay animation, sometimes plasticine animation, is one of many forms of stop-motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine clay.
Lillian F. Schwartz is an American artist considered a pioneer of computer-mediated art and one of the first artists notable for basing almost her entire oeuvre on computational media. Many of her ground-breaking projects were done in the 1960s and 1970s, well before the desktop computer revolution made computer hardware and software widely available to artists.
Strata-cut animation, also spelled stratcut or straticut, is a form of clay animation, itself one of many forms of stop motion animation.
Clay painting animation is a form of clay animation, which is one of the many kinds of stop motion animation. It blurs the distinction between clay animation, cel animation and cutout animation.
Closed Mondays is an eight-minute clay animation film, created by Bob Gardiner and filmed by Will Vinton in 1974. It was produced by Lighthouse Productions, released by Pyramid Films in the United States, and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1975.
Joanna Priestley is an American contemporary film director, producer, animator and teacher. Her films are in the collections of the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Priestley has had retrospectives at the British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art and Hiroshima International Animation Festival in Japan. Bill Plympton calls her the "Queen of independent animation". Priestley lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
James Robbins "Bob" Gardiner was a multi-talented artist, painter, cartoonist, animator, holographer, musician, storyteller, and comedy writer. He invented the stop-motion 3-D clay animation technique which his collaborator Will Vinton would later market as Claymation, although Bob preferred the term Sculptimation for his frame-by-frame method of sculpting plasticine clay characters and sets.
Chel White is an American film director, composer, screenwriter and visual effects artist. In his independent films and music videos, White is known for his stylized, often experimental use of images, unusual animation and narratives depicting an outsider's perspective. He often adopts darkly humorous and poetic sensibilities to explore topics of love, obsession and alienation; with dreams and the subconscious being his greatest influences. He describes his own work as “stories and images that reside on the brink of dreams, or linger on the periphery of distorted memories.” A Rockefeller Fellow, Chel White has made three films based on the work of Peabody Award-winning writer and radio personality Joe Frank.
The Colours of My Father: A Portrait of Sam Borenstein is a 1992 Canadian short animated documentary film directed by Joyce Borenstein.
The portmanteau term clayography is a term created by Academy Award-winning animator Adam Elliot. Elliot struggled with ways of describing his unique animation technique and so created this word to aptly express his artistic style.
Candyjam is a 1988 7 minute 35mm short animated film animated collaboration by ten animators from four countries produced and directed by Joanna Priestley and Joan C. Gratz. The animation was made with clay painting, drawings, puppets and object animation.
Pro and Con is a 1993 9 minute 16mm short animated film produced, directed and animated by Joanna Priestley and Joan Gratz using drawings on paper, pixillated hands and object animation. The "Pro" section of the film was written by Barbara Carnegie and Joanna Priestley and narrated by Lt. Janice Inman. The "Con" section was written by Jeff Green and narrated by Allen Nause. The sound was designed and produced by Lance Limbocker and Chel White with music by Chel White. Pro and Con was commissioned through the Metropolitan Arts Commission's Percent for Art Program in Multnomah County, Oregon.
Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis are a Canadian animation duo. On January 24, 2012, they received their second Oscar nomination, for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) animated short film, Wild Life (2011). With their latest film, The Flying Sailor, they received several nominations and awards, including for the Best Canadian Film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and on January 24, 2023, they received a nomination for the 95th Academy Awards under the category Best Animated Short Film.
Adam is a 1992 British stop-motion clay animated short film written, animated and directed by Peter Lord of Aardman Animations. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short and the BAFTA Film Award for Short Animation in 1992, and won two awards at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 1993. It is based on the beginning of the Book of Genesis. It was distributed by Aardman Animations.
Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase is a 1992 American animated short by Joan C. Gratz.
Susan Carol Shadburne was an American screenwriter, director, producer, and filmmaker, best known for her collaborations with her husband, claymation animator Will Vinton. She wrote the screenplay for The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985), directed by Vinton, and wrote and directed the supernatural thriller film Shadow Play (1986). In addition to feature films, Shadburne wrote and directed several short films. Two of the short films Shadburne wrote that Vinton directed—Rip Van Winkle (1978) and The Great Cognito (1983) –were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.