Output details

An Eyeful of Sound

Brief Description

An Eyeful of Sound is a short animated documentary about audio-visual synaesthesia. It was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust through an Arts Award after receiving R&D from them to develop the project in collaboration with Dr Jamie Ward, Reader in Neuro-psychology at the University of Sussex. The film screened at many festivals internationally and was winner of three awards (see CV), including best science film awarded by the science journal Nature at the 2010 Imagine Film Festival (New York, USA).

This film led to invitations to do a masterclass on animated documentary at the Melbourne International Animation Festival (June 2012), to speak at the Royal Institute of Australia and to present a public lecture at the American Synesthesia Association at Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) University, Toronto, Canada (May/June 2013).

Research Rationale

Animated documentary is a controversial area within contemporary animation research (evidenced by the Animated Realities conference at Edinburgh University, 2010, and the recent special edition of Animation: An interdisciplinary journal, 2011 which was dedicated to the genre). My work has been within this genre for ten years (beginning with Success with Sweet Peas, 2003) as my interest in representing the non-indexical through the form of animation using the documentary genre has developed through work about the intensely subjective and in collaboration with scientists (doubled up, 2003).

Strategies Undertaken

The film developed and expanded a collaboration with Jamie Ward that began with ‘Synaesthesia and Sound’, a R&D project made with the New London Orchestra which had culminated in a Live Science experiment at the Science Museum (and an article published from the results of that) and an event at the Dana Centre. It used animation to convey to the audience the intensely subjective experience of those who process the world with this extra-sensory perception, using a systematic interview and verification process to ensure rigour. The film converts the uniquely subjective synaesthetic visuals that were triggered in the interviewees’ brains into visual representations.