Jill Kennedy + John Payne
We Skyped with Jill Kennedy and John Payne from the opposite side of the planet, direct from Cambridge to Auckland, New Zealand. John designed and engineered the sound for Jill’s film Canaries in Colour.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Jill, can you tell us something about your background? I understand you were born in Scotland but raised in New Zealand?
JILL KENNEDY: Yeah, I moved out here when I was just a little baby, so maybe two years old. I grew up here and went to school here. I did go back to Scotland, and I lived there a couple of years, just up until the beginning of last year when I came back and started this one-year graduate diploma. But before I went back to Scotland I did a four-year degree in painting; then I took a couple years out in Scotland, traveling around and working, and then came back and did the digital animation last year. So I’m quite, well, just brand new. This was my second film. My first, Neuro Economy, I actually did while I was at school; it was my school project.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: And John, you’re also a New Zealander?
JOHN PAYNE: That’s right. I’m one of those master of few trades sorts of people, or master of none, maybe. I also do animation and graphic design, and obviously composing and audio stuff. And I’m a big fan of multidisciplinary people I suppose; when I first saw Jill’s stuff, and she was just starting to do animation for the first time, I realized pretty early on that her work is really a continuation of her painting. It’s not so much a clean break and starting to do something else, it’s just changing the practice, I guess.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Jill, how did you make the decision to transition from painting to animation?
JILL KENNEDY:It wasn’t something I had been planning for a long time; it was something that an old painting tutor of mine had recommended to me, something that hadn’t really crossed my mind much, and it got me thinking about it. I got excited about the idea of doing something that’s quite new, here anyway. There aren’t too many people here doing animation in the fine arts sense. I guess there are a few people doing more commercial work now, but it’s still very much a growing thing here, so I thought it would be good to just jump in and play around with something that’s relatively undiscovered.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Is New Zealand a good place to be an artist?
JILL KENNEDY: Yeah, I think so. There’s a great awareness. Everybody’s got connections somehow, whether it be someone they know, or whether they’re doing it themselves. It’s quite highly promoted. I don’t know if there’s much funding in it – that would be the downside, but as far as an audience, there’s definitely a good audience for it.
JOHN PAYNE: The government does try as hard as it can to help people along, but because New Zealand’s a small place and we only have a few million people, you get this kind of liberation, I suppose. People are either making very commercial work, and existing in a commercial way, or there are a very smallish number of commercially successful fine artists. But for a lot of people, they do stuff because they want to, and not because they think they can be successful financially. It’s the same in the music scene, I guess, and the arts scene: there’s a lot of people just driven by a desire to do stuff. That gives it a sort of honesty, I think.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: On both sides, commercially and in the art world, does a lot of work end up leaving the country?
JOHN PAYNE: I think a lot more now that there’s digital communication to move things through. I think in the past it was fairly locked off, with the occasional overnight success story – someone would have a great big show and be flavor of the month, and that would lead to a few other things, and it would kind of die down again until the next one. You know the way you suddenly get little spikes out of places like Iceland or Sweden? And for a few months it’s like, look at everything coming out of there, and then it goes away? We were a lot like that for a long time.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Jill, can you tell me about the source material you used for Canaries in Colour?
JILL KENNEDY:A big chunk of it came from a book that I found when I was down in Wellington, which was Canaries in Colour. It’s this really nicely illustrated book with all the different species of canaries that you can get, probably from the 1960s—no, 1971. I had always been planning on—after Neuro Economy I collected an enormous amount of source material for that film, when I was studying, but with the restrictions of the course I had to make something quite quickly, and I felt like I’d lined up all this stuff, and I hadn’t really gotten a chance to play around with all that much. So I decided I would do this series with all this educational material that I collected. Hopefully there’ll be a few more.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Are you planning to continue with the series?
JILL KENNEDY: Yeah, I think so. I’ve got so much more lined up that I’d really love to use, and it’s been really fun working with them. And it’s definitely something that I’m still interested in: a lot of those old encyclopedic texts and images, and a lot of educational and learning equipment, like the spirograph and stereoscopic viewers, and things like that—I always get into those.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Did you also use source material as a painter?
JILL KENNEDY: Well, yes. I worked from photographs; a lot of what I did for a while while painting was from family photos that I sort of cut up crudely and Photoshopped, and then sort of reconstructed scenes with them, and then I’d paint from the constructed scenes. So I did have a lot of found photograph material; not so much of the printed text and things like that.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Can both of you tell me about the techniques you used in making Canaries in Colour?
JILL KENNEDY: I think I made this one entirely in AfterEffects this time. So, utilizing the 3D space in AfterEffects with all the 2D cut-outs, whereas my film before I used a bit of Maya to do the 3D. But this one was purely AfterEffects, just scanning into Photoshop and working with it in AfterEffects.
JOHN PAYNE: A big part of the way the piece ended up looking, I think, came from working online together; Jill would finish a bit of stuff, and make a loop, and send that to me, and I’d make a bit of audio and send it back.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: So you were making this piece together long-distance?
JOHN PAYNE: Yes, I was in Singapore and Jill was in Auckland, and luckily there’s only five hours difference, so there would be quite a bit of time on the weekends when we could sit down together and work. And also, actually, while I was at work. That was great, because I’d get home having seen a bunch of fresh stuff and dive into some more audio, and Jill, here, would be fast asleep in the middle of the night. So I’d send her some stuff for her to look at the next morning, and get feedback from her later on. But those times on the weekend, when we were both online at the same time, were, I think, a testament to how you can actually do that now, with chat programs and file transfers. You can send stuff really fast, and you can work backwards and forwards internationally really swiftly.
One of the things I thought I’d miss, moving to work in Singapore, was working with people like Jill. But as it turns out, just by wanting to do it, you can actually get it happening. So I think it’s that backwards and forwards process of throwing each other bits and pieces of stuff, and giving each other pleasant surprises of what we’ve done with the material. Audio-wise, there were huge things thrown at me that were big signposts: as soon as I saw the Scotsman dancing I knew I’d use some great bagpipe source material, or what have you. Jill had done a huge amount of the soundtrack work really well on Neuro Economy; I really liked her use of machine noises and clicks and that interrupted tape kind of feel where you felt as if things were being spliced together. And so I picked up on that and used that a little bit. But we’ve always had a pretty good understanding of where each other’s sensibilities are, so it’s really easy to work together.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Did this creative process affect your ultimate vision for the piece?
JILL KENNEDY: Yeah, this piece in particular I had an opportunity to show in a group exhibition here at the City Art Rooms, so I kind of made it in mind to have it ready for that show. So, it was originally intended for an art gallery, Canaries in Colour. But I think it’s got flexibility. I’m going to enter it into the film festivals – the more experimental ones. I guess Neuro Economy was more in a short film format that would maybe be more appealing to film festivals.
JOHN PAYNE: Just to give you the details, that was an exhibition called Forestaurant curated by Sam Hartnett.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: ill, do you keep collections of source material, waiting to be used?
JILL KENNEDY: Yeah, I’m constantly collecting, and it’s definitely an experimental process. I don’t start off with a script and a storyline and a storyboard; it’s more a case of pulling things together and seeing how they look and getting ideas from that, and making little pieces that I might call upon again from something else. It’s an ongoing process.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Do you combine artistic practice and commercial work? Are you both artists full time?
JILL KENNEDY: I guess that’s where it’s at for me, and what I’m most interested in. But I think there are things to be learnt from commercial work as well, and there’s a couple of things I’ve getting involved with that I’m quite keen to see happen. That’ll be interesting. We’re probably going to look at doing some stuff together in the way of commercial work, maybe setting up as a studio ourselves, doing freelance work.
JOHN PAYNE: I’ve sort of been knocking around for a while, doing various things, from playing in bands and making records and touring, to being a graphic designer, both freelance and working for people. These days I’m working quite a lot in animation. In Singapore I’m a layout supervisor on a children’s television show for Discovery. So I’m pretty busy with a big commercial job at the moment, but at the same time I’ve always made a lot of motion graphics experiments, and moved around and done as much stuff as I can in various ways with likeminded people. But, I think, for me, this certain kind of motion artwork is just becoming something that I’ve wanted to spend a lot more time doing. Especially having just spent the last year in a commercial children’s television environment, much as I enjoy it, it’s not my burning passion to be there, so I’m very keen to move into a position where I can just spend more of my time designing and making original work. And if that means doing some commercial stuff with people who I like working with—Jill would be great!—in order to get there, that would be good, too.
LUMEN ECLISPE: Can you provide any recommendations for our readers?
JOHN PAYNE: I’m in Singapore, of course, which is in some ways a bit of a desert in terms of independent artistic work, but having said that, the place itself is culturally incredible. It’s really full-on; there are big Indian and Malay and Chinese parts of town that are just busy and noisily going off. The one place I’ve been getting a lot of inspiration lately is a little bookshop on Telok Ayer in Chinatown, called Books Actually booksactually.com. I think they were featured in Wallpaper recently. They’re an independent bookshop, and they source out-of-print and warehouse stock books, as well as some new stuff, some stock magazines. But they also make, and stitch, and bind a lot of notebooks, and have exhibitions of local artists’ work, and they’ve recently just begun their own imprint series of local writers and poets. They’re a really great little oasis in the middle of Singapore.
LUMEN ECLIPSE: Jill, what’s next in the New Educational Series?
JILL KENNEDY: I’ve a really good collection of books on rocks, now [laughs]. So I might go down those lines, we’ll see about that.
JOHN PAYNE: I think with Jill’s work, if you look at the first piece and then you look at the second piece, you can probably start to map out a sort of trajectory and say ‘well maybe it’s going to go here,’ but I don’t think Jill herself would want to give anything away.