research project - john summerson

I chose the filmmaker John Summerson for my research project. Summerson is an animator. He got his masters degree in documentary animation from the Royal College of Art in London and his BFA in animated arts at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. He specializes in create nonfiction and documentary animation. He makes his own films as well as works commercially. He works with stop motion, 2D and 3D animation. 

Summerson's work deals in a similar vein to mine, with humor, grief, love and loss. One of Summerson's earlier films, Road Trip, which he made while still in undergrad, was honored with an Audience Choice Award at PNCA REC Fest and it was screened at the 2014 Northwest Animation Festival as well as Portland's Experimental Film Festival. As Summerson describes on his website, Road Trip depicts what it would be like to take a road trip with the folks we've lost over the years. 

Stills from Summerson's film Road Trip (2013).

Summerson's films can connect to some of Barthes' ideas about 'the death of the author' and work vs. text. As Barthes describes, "the work can be seen, the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules; the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in movement of a discourse" (157). Summerson's work is the films he creates, the text comes from this work. Once his films are released, it is in the viewer's hands to interpret the text for themselves. 

With his films viewers can laugh at the humor, and empathize with the grief he presents. As a viewer myself, I watched his works and formed my own text from it, ultimately inspiring me to make my own films about my personal experiences. Summerson's films combine audio phone call conversations with beautiful imagery through his animations, humorous and melancholic, bittersweet all at once, that really strikes a chord with viewers. His films live on through viewers, taking his work and creating a multitude of text.