Alan Mason
BIOGRAPHY
Alan Mason is an experienced designer /illustrator/animator and writer who has worked on numerous film and arts projects, including prize winning features Silent Scream (Silver Bear Winner, Berlin Festival) and RA: Path of the Sun God (dir: Lesley Keen.) He recently produced the animated film Roderick. His 1997 novel Melodrama was described in the Glasgow Herald as ‘entertainment of a high order (which) should appeal to those who value ironical humour and linguistic wit and accomplishment… he has a facility which could run away with him were it not for his ironic sense of all that distances the contemporary reader from the chosen period. For this is not inert imitation but a comic technique which provides a springboard for narratives of great wit, flair and inventiveness. It is the kind of book in danger of being squeezed out in the present climate of commodification of literature and domination of the market by literary fads…’ He has taught animation at ECA for nearly 30 years.
RESEARCH
‘My principal research project The Magazine is an extreme long-form experimental novel in 12 parts commissioned by The Caseroom Press (University of Lincoln.) It derives its inspiration from the idea of time taken – the time it takes to produce a frame of a film or a sentence on a page and how long an audience can be expected to wait between each of an author’s ‘expressions’ and still make sense of the work as a whole. The Magazine takes the form of an illustrated Victorian compendium and the first part was published in 2013. Expected to play out over a twenty year span, it seeks to test the endurance of both the author and his audience by pushing the boundaries of how to read either a film or a life’s work. The writing is attributed to a team of imaginary editors and contributors with multiple pseudonyms – although always me – resulting in an open tone to the authorship that evolves over the period of publication. Drawing from filmmaking practice and form, which exists as a series of images that make sense in the sum of their parts, The Magazine jumps and edits between worlds, contexts, time and space, to create a fragmentary wholeness only accessed across the whole sequence. To date three of the twelve parts have been published.’
TEACHING
Associated Programmes
Animation BA (Hons)
Animation – MFA
Teaching
Lecturer in Animation at Undergraduate and Postgraduate Level. Course Organiser for Animation 2A: Character; Animation 2B: Narrative; Animation 4A: Research and Production; Animation 4C: Production and Post Production
https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/alan-mason
