Digital Shift or Explosion: Is Technology a Substitute for Content in Independent Animation?

The digital shift in independent animation production, post-production and distribution would be better described as a digital explosion, such has been the massive impact of digitised media. Its aftershock has radically altered the landscape of animation and film media, the like of which has not been seen since the monumental social, economic and political fallout brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Fundamentally, the arrival and pervasive nature of digital technologies has revolutionised animation to the extent that previous understanding needs to be challenged. We are forced to reconsider, reconfigure and rediscover the parameters of the form by engaging with and developing an understanding of the diverse nature of existing creators already committed to the form, but also those creators who increasingly use animation to quantify, investigate and challenge our assumptions of captured imaginary worlds. For architects, writers, engineers and scientists, the realms of animated sequences open up possibilities not yet chartered, rationalised or fully understood by their own core disciplines. These pioneers come from a background that is non-traditional but uses, references and relies on visual culture that might be considered to be the very language of animation, its dialects shaped by the primacy and diversity of its users to explore, explain and engage with the audience at large. If we are to debate the future of animation, we must first accept that animation is not ischolar_mained in tradition - a new wave has arrived that requires rationalised recognition through appropriate sub sections of our previous understanding of Animation Studies.