top of page
DÉNOUEMENT
2022
Masters Research Project
Dénouement: A Subjective Reflection on Death, Loss and Grief through Animation Practice
Dénouement is a practice-based research project that engages with the emotionally fraught and complex experience of losing a loved one. The research positions the medium of hand-drawn animation as rich territory for exploring visual expressions of the internal, psychological, and abstract dialogue when grieving. As a personal reflection of inarticulable feelings, the aim is not to show the world as it is but as it is travelled through psychologically.
The final short film underpins the practitioner’s passion for drawing the world (as they see it), moving it in time and moving those who view the work, emotionally.
Through thinking, making and feeling processes, the project asks whether hand-drawn animation might be a tool to grapple with loss and is informed by autoethnographic inquiry and making methods such as ideation drawing, iterative drawing and selected dramaturgical tools.
As a practitioner and researcher, I developed a toolkit to distil and refine this ongoing conversation through the medium of animation, exploring death, loss and grief.
Alongside this, I have concluded my most significant project to date in terms of quality, scope, and emotional weight.
The practice became a mode of coping through rising melancholy, so in ways, the animating process truly becomes a powerful healing agent. The fragile sketches emerged during production and finalised themselves in my journey to grapple with loss, capturing fingerprints as part of the performance (of the practice). For a topic as confronting as death, the tactile quality of illustrating movement feels like a natural progression from the research gathered.
The gratification of drawing out frames threading into a string of motion kept me returning to the film because there is beauty through the practice, even when it is difficult, gruelling and distressing. The final film has now become my most challenging, frustrating and significant milestone as a practitioner.
In terms of audio, depending on the environmental/situational context of the film, it can have the original score or silence. The film may run as a loop without sound in a gallery context, embracing the ambience of the physical surrounding. In an online film festival context, it may include the intended audio to echo the practitioner's lens further as a submission. The film is open to both takes, where silence allows an audience to bring their own subjective sounds and soundtrack to the experience — parallel to the ideas behind the visuals.
On the other end, the original sound design is subjective to my experience and offers an inkling into how I saw my grieving process. Both are poetic and meaningful but depend on the viewer for what resonates with them more, which I am open to discussing.
During this experience, I had many sleepless nights. I often woke up from nightmares that relived the past and visualised future deaths. As a result, I experienced loss daily during my restless hours. Sometimes it was deaths that had happened, and sometimes it was deaths that had not. It was strange because, while not concrete in reality or happening in real-time, I still woke up believing it.
A safety concern often arose due to the project’s emotionally draining subject. There were the personal contemplations to contend with, where the emotions manifested into a daily ritual — to think, feel, and dream about death. The autoethnographic framework (established previously) became the building blocks of the making to reinforce truthful reflections and feelings. They also brought me back to the Making, Thinking and Feeling process, which was crucial to the project and how it emerged.
The turmoil I felt is evident in the illustrations, final film and thesis of the project.
Future endeavours might expand on the relevance of using animation's traditional form (animating with cel sheets and paper, rather than digital drawing) in the conversation of death or other difficult subjects. It may also expand on other approaches to understanding grief and models that offer other theoretical musings. It will be enlightening to revisit the project as I imagine my understanding will change over time, having encountered more life experiences.
The project has wrapped up at its final stage, closing the chapter on this journey as its own dénouement. With that, I leave you to experience the work and hopefully spark thoughtful conversations about loss and grieving, framed in human experience.
bottom of page