animate!

Films : Ferment : all

animate! synopsis

A momentary lapse of motion as Macmillan cuts a cross-section through the city’s day. Mobile photography or freeze film? Small epiphanies and the human trace whatever the terms.

long synopsis

In a quiet city square an old man clutches his chest and falls to the ground, and time stands still. We travel from the square, down streets, through buildings – the human condition unfolds in glimpses of frozen moments.

Tim Macmillan pioneered ‘time-slice’ techniques as a student at Bath Academy of Art and the Slade School. He has used it in a diverse range of works, including gallery installation, natural history, commercials and feature films.

key credits

director: Tim Macmillan
time slice photography: Andy Kemp
editor: Malcolm MacMillan
producer: Grace Kitto

Tim Macmillan

biography

Tim lives near Bath. He made Ferment for animate! in 1999, using the time-slice image ‘freezing’ technique he developed at the Slade in the 1980’s (and which was subsequently adopted in The Matrix).

His gallery work Dead Horse won, very unusually for moving image work, a Citibank Photography Prize nomination. It also attracted the wrath of animal rights fanatics who sent his family hypodermic needles in the post. Animal Tragic is a wry response.

Whilst making this film Tim was also busy inventing and developing Flybot , an aerial robot to explore rainforest tree canopy which launched at the Eden Project , Cornwall, in September 2003.

December 2003