Animator and Sound
Experimental Animation - HD Video, Stereo, Monochrome Color, 17 sec, 2026
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This short animation was created to support the Projection Department for The Playhouse at White Lake's theatrical production of HERStory of Animation, an educational musical about the history and importance of the role of women in the animation industry. A musical created to support the Muskegon Museum of Art's exhibit of the same name.

The work of several women, from Mary Blair, to Helena Smith Dayton, to Mary Weiser are represented in the musical. I chose to make my visual piece an animated "portrait" of Marge Champion, a dancer of whom beginning in the 1930s, was selected by Disney as a movement model for several Disney characters, perhaps most famously Snow White from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

Champion was filmed on a makeshift set on 35mm and the artists reviewed this footage to guide their work for complex movements required for the film. In some cases, to meet a tight deadline, the artists would animate using a technique called "rotoscoping", wherein a live action film is projected onto the drawing surface with the footage traced onto drawings frame by frame. This results in a highly realistic form of animation.

I choses to replicate this style of rotoscoping as the animators of the period might have done, having sourced a short film sample of Marge Champion herself demonstrating a simple series of twirls. It is stylized as a pencil test reel as both a meta-presentation on animation and to illustrate Marge Champions impact in animation existing at a compelling middle ground between artistic and technical fields.