In the second of my collaborator profiles I’ll talk about working with Gareth Houghton, who is a motion graphics professional. Gareth and I studied fine art together 11 years ago and have been friends ever since, although our practices have diverged as I’ve followed a fine art route and he has developed his work in the commercial world.
I’ve called on Gareth’s skills a number of times over the years to help me with editing video/animation work, starting with editing together my commission for Liverpool Biennial’s Art for Places project in 2010. That experience of working with him led to me picking up some skills in video editing that have proved useful so that I can try things out and create simple works by myself. I also had Gareth’s help to edit the footage for ‘a remarkable architecture of stairs’ which was shown at the Bluecoat last year. With each new project I work on, the process gets more complicated as I understand more about what can be done, so for this exhibition I wanted Gareth on hand as all three new works had a video element to them.
As he works with the software (after effects) on a daily basis, it means that Gareth knows all the shortcuts and processes which I don’t and would lead to me spending HOURS making the work by myself and to a much lower standard. For this show he edited, masked and tweaked the timelapse footage from the New Mills pavement installation and we worked together to work out how to create the animations that form Residential mosaic. As time was tight he also showed me how to edit the footage together for the projected hands bit of ‘Displaced persons’, giving me a test version that I could base the final work on. It’s this process of learning, watching and developing solutions to my ideas that helps my work to progress.
Here’s the showreel for Gareth’s company Clinic Motion Media (the new work gets on there too – keep an eye out for ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Merthyr Tidfil’)
