Frank and Caroline Mouris - "Finding Animation"
- renowned independant collage animators (from "Frank Film" to "Sesame Street" and more) delivering a series of workshops, lectures & screenings

Frank and Caroline Mouris are celebrated independent animators who, in addition to their personal animated films, have done freelance collage animation for, among others, Children's Television Workshop (Sesame Street),
MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Cartoon Network, HBO, ITVS, Warner Cable, Disney, Levi's Shirts and PETA. Their first film, Frank Film (1973),
won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, as well as winning many other foreign and domestic film competitions, including the Grand Prix at the Annecy Film Festival the same year. It was also selected for the
Olympiad of Animation as one of the thirty-two greatest short films ever made and in 1996 was chosen by the National Film Registry; an organisation created in 1988 to preserve acclaimed films which have been deemed as
"culturally, historically and aesthetically important". Since making this film, Frank Mouris and his wife Caroline have continued this autobiographical theme with Frankly Caroline (1999) and are currently at work on the third of their trilogy of 'Frank' films currently titled Frankie goes to Hollywood.

Frank and Caroline Mouris never intended to become animators, but as the list of careers they would rather not engage in got longer and longer, they found that they were actually best suited to their own peculiar niche of animation which consists of finding interesting (to them at least) pictures, objects, people, whatever which they could then animate frame by frame, whether under the camera on an animation stand or out in the so-called real world with a bolex (on a tripod or simply handheld). The films made on an animation stand, or simply under a bolex on a tripod that's aimed downward, are essentially edited in the camera.

The films made out in the real world were edited to within an inch of their lives on a flatbed editor. But now they work exclusively on a macintosh computer for any freelance work, taking pictures with a digital camera or scanning collages made by hand. They use adobe photoshop a little, but they live in adobe after effects, the cult software of certain animators. For their personal films, however ("Frank film", "Frankly Caroline" and, soon, "Frankie goes to hollywood"), they still prefer to cut or rip images from magazines and catalogs and glue them down onto acetate cels ("Frank film") or paper 'cels' ("Frankly Caroline" and "Frankie goes to hollywood"), and shoot them on creamy dreamy Kodak film stock, either 16mm ("Frank film") or 35mm ("Frankly Caroline" and "Frankie goes to hollywood").

The filmmakers will show an early art school effort ("you're not real pretty but you're mine"), which was in effect a seedbed for all their future work. Then, they will show "frank film", which won them an oscar (and most international animation awards). Two public service spots and one tv commercial followed, the least offensive offers of the flood that came after "Frank film" burst upon an unsuspecting world. Rather than repeat themselves, the mourises explored pixillated documentary with the simultaneously shot/edited "screen- test" and "coney".

Switching direction again, they shot their first and only 'character animation', the abstract film "Impasse". After some success with 'real tv documentaries', they attended the american film institute, made short tapes and a final thesis film, and threw themselves into an independent feature, which was such a hideous experience they now call it "god's way of saying, 'gee, you kids should really stick to animation, because that's what you do best!'". They plunged into the freelance world of animation and worked yearly for "sesame street" and "3-2-1 contact", a PBS science show for kids. Other freelance work followed. But personal animated films are their true love, and they work on them every free moment, which in the freelance animation world can be all too frequent.
Luckily, their personal films are still appreciated. "Frank film" won a special jury prize at the first-ever timeless competition of the Turku Finland Animation Festival. It has also been reprised at Oberhausen, Goeteborg, Locarno, Tampere, Annecy and others, often in the company of "Frankly Caroline". They received a retrospective screening in 2001 at New York's museum of modern art, which hopes to debut "Frankie goes to hollywood".

http://www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/ftv/what/guestartists.html