The second Animate OPEN exhibition call for entries and commission opportunity was recently announced by Animate Projects and QUAD. These are detailed separately below.

Animate OPEN is an international call for experimental single channel work that relates to the theme Parts & Labour: emphasising the craft – analogue and digital – of contemporary creative animation practice. Selected works will be presented in a gallery, in cinemas and online.

The Animate OPEN is for complete works by UK and international artists, animators and filmmakers, produced since January 2014.

Up to 20 works will be chosen for gallery exhibition at QUAD from 28 November 2015 – 24 January 2016, for online exhibition and for a cinema programme as part of Move It, a season of British and international animation, touring the UK in 2016.

Prizes up for grabs include a jury award of £1,500 and an audience prize of £750 will be selected by visitors to the exhibition at QUAD. Artist fees will be given for works included in the gallery exhibition and UK tour.

A small submission fee applies. For application details and more information, please visit here.

Deadline: 3 September

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The Parts & Labour commission call for proposals is for a UK based artist to make on-site and moving image work that employs animation, drawing and digital technologies, for exhibition in QUAD’s Extra Gallery Spaces in Derby and online. The commissioned work will be presented alongside, and reflect the themes of, the Animate OPEN: Parts & Labour, opening at QUAD on 28 November 2015.

The selected artist will be based in QUAD’s dedicated studio space, with access to QUAD facilities. The fee is £3000 inclusive of VAT plus £1000 towards material and production costs and £250 for delivery of a workshop and talk. There will be some additional support towards travel and accommodation. The artist will receive curatorial support from the commissioning partners and assistance with installation at QUAD from the gallery team.

For guidelines and to find out how to apply, please visit here.

Deadline: 22 July

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Find more opportunities in our weekly bulletin here.

The UWS Creative Media Academy and New Media Scotland’s Alt-w Fund have joined forces to offer a new £25,000 digital art commission for Paisley with investment from Renfrewshire Council. The project invites artists to explore, reinvent, and re-imagine Paisley’s rich cultural heritage in support of the town’s ambition to become City of Culture in 2021. They are looking for expressions of interest from artists in Europe to make a new piece of work for the town.

Artists are encouraged to take inspiration from Paisley’s vast historical and cultural heritage. During the Industrial Revolution, Paisley was an important textiles manufacturer and the colourful Paisley pattern became known worldwide. Paisley museums boasts a collection of over 350,000 objects and the town has over 100 listed buildings.

The commission will be run as a pilot scheme for a potential series of Creative Media Academy projects exploring art, technology and research. The final work is to be completed and presented by 30 June 2016.

For more information, please visit New Media Scotland.

Deadline: 12 June

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Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival returns this September. The 10th edition of the award-winning Festival promises to be bigger and better than ever before with international commissions, film premieres, installations as well as a Short Film Award for filmmakers and artists with a cash prize attached.

The festival, which attracts over 8,000 visitors is considered to be a highlight on the cultural landscape of the Scottish Borders and Northumberland and welcomes people from across Scotland and England who come to enjoy a range of film and art installations all set within historic Berwick.

Since its inaugural festival in 2005, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has had a vision to transform Berwick into one big moving image installation – a visual and cultural spectacle and it certainly delivers. The festival occupies a unique space in the UK festival landscape – in uniting cinema with moving image art, while taking inspiration from other art forms…all in one place, over five days.

Field Music perform score to John Grierson’s film Drifters – Photo: Will Sadler

It is also distinctive in its setting, the town of Berwick provides an awe-inspiring background to the festival programme, with screenings taking place in the most unusual of venues, from the medieval town walls to prison cells in the Town Hall and the more traditional Maltings Theatre & Cinema.

The festival organisers have announced this year’s call for entries which closes on 16 June. Each year, the festival curates its programme to a specific theme, and this year, with the Scottish independence referendum taking place, it seems pertinent that the theme is ‘Border Crossing.’ The Festival is calling all artists and filmmakers to respond to the theme by submitting work via its website.

‘Border Crossing’ will take audiences on a journey, setting out to cross and transcend borders in all directions, exploring border identities all over the world. Berwick-upon-Tweed makes an ideal starting point: a border town in a region once known as ‘the debatable lands,’ with an identity neither English nor Scottish, but all of its own; it will bring together independent film and artists’ video to explore boundaries – on the map and in the mind – and the spaces in between.

Works submitted to the festival can explore themes of cultural heritage, changing identities from individual to societal and cultural, travel and migration, and the crossing of boundaries; your work can be of any type and any length including including narrative and experimental, live action and animation, fiction and documentary. What’s more, all single screen works under 20 minutes will automatically be eligible for selection for the Inntravel Short Film Award. The competitive programme will be selected by the festival curators, and the winning work will be awarded by a professional jury during the festival, where £750 will be donated towards the artist/director’s next project.

Visit the festival website here for details on how to submit an entry.

Amit Madheshiya’s Talkies Wallah projected onto the Berwick Watchtower

In addition, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in partnership with Northern Film & Media have recently announced a new opportunity for filmmakers and visual artists from anywhere in the world to submit a proposal to create a new moving image work. Visual artists and filmmakers are invited to submit proposals in response to the festival theme of Border Crossing. Proposals may be for projected, installed or screened work, to be made either for single or multi-channel presentation. The new commission will be premiered at the 10th Film & Media Arts Festival in September 2014. The selected proposal will be awarded £5,000 GBP in artist/production fees, and installation costs will be covered in addition.

For further information and to submit a proposal for the commission, please visit the festival website.

Proposals Deadline: 28 May
Call for Entries Deadline: 16 June

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Find more opportunities in our weekly bulletin here.

Creating PULSE from Royal Philharmonic Society on Vimeo.

PULSE is a mini-opera, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, bringing together British/Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova and Scottish filmmaker Ruth Paxton to create a new score and film for the PRS for Music Foundation’s New Music Biennial in 2014, one of 20 new commissions selected from over 130 proposals.

Taking the ideas of ‘pulse’ and ‘place’, this collaboration pairs Tabakova’s rich musical language with Paxton’s bold filmmaking to create a film that explores the energy and diversity of life in a modern city and the driving forces behind how different societies and cultures mix. This is the first time that composer and filmmaker have worked together. They are collaborating on the narrative shaping of the film, which will be screened to Tabakova’s new score for piano, percussion and gamelan, performed live and recorded, nationwide.

PULSE will be performed throughout 2014 at a range of venues across the UK including:
4 – 6 July 2014 | Southbank Centre, London
2 – 3 August 2014 | Part of Commonwealth Games, Glasgow

You can get involved in this project by supporting PULSE here.

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Max Hattler & blackboard scribbles which pertain to the ‘Max Hattler Canal Commission’, a water screen projection which is premiering at KXFS in London on 6 September. Photo: Lucy Pawlak.

I mainly live in London but don’t have a studio there. I travel a fair bit with my work, and I’m laptop-based, so I can work anywhere. I like putting myself in new environments and taking inspiration from them. Currently, I am doing an artist residency with Pixel Palace at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle. Big Newcastle daily The Journal wrote an article about me and my two fellow residents, Lucy Pawlak and GH Hovagimyan last week which you can read here.

While in Newcastle I’ve been working on several projects, including Model Starship which I shot in my temporary flat in the iconic Byker Wall council estate … Another new work is Catch, the official music video for the single of the same name by The Egg, from their brand new album Something To Do. You can view Catch online here.

The main project here at Pixel Palace, an investigation of scanlines and moiree, is still a little top secret.

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This is work is a film by Alex Tobin which was part of his collection for Embassy‘s “meat force” show in 2010.

Alex Tobin is a freelance artist/designer who works in moving image as well as illustration & sound. Alex is also part of the Yuck ‘n Yum collective.

See more work Alex Tobin from on Vimeo.
Visit Alex’s website here.

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