Mobile Animation Station
2023-2025
Conceptual Artwork/Performance
Converted a mid-sized, decommissioned school bus into a mobile animation station. The inside is a fully accessible tiny house complete with copper clawfoot bath tub and outside is covered with chalkboards to animate while traveling, hold animation workshops, mural events and park it on the street for people to write on. Currently scheduling the route and dates for stops along a 2024-25 tour. Please reach out if it is something that coincides with your programming.
2024-2025 Tour
Started reaching out to some museums, universities, film and music festivals and animation events for stops along the route. Generally speaking, fall 2024 will be moving south along the east coast, winter 2025 will be in the southern states, and the spring will be moving north along the west coast. This is still very much in the planning stages, so if you’d like a stop along the route, please reach out to email@dustystudio.com.
Animation Workshops
Host a basic or intermediate workshop for students raging from upper grammar school, middle school or high school. Workshop will be held outside and animation techniques will be taught on the side of the bus. Students will learn some of the principles of animation (squash and stretch, etc.) and learn Stop Motion Studio, software that is available for the phone or iPads for extremely low costs, so that they can then take what they learned and start working on their own animations at home.
Chalkboard Animation Master Class
More advanced students of animation can participate in a master class or portfolio review. Dustin Grella has been creating chalkboard animations for almost two decades and has experienced just about every issue that there is to overcome in the craft. The class will discuss camera, lighting and production techniques, or can focus on specific projects that the students are working on. A potential portfolio review for both commercial and creative projects can provide critical feedback for animators who are ready to transition out of a university setting.
Animation Mural Events
This can be an individual illustrator drawing on the bus for people to watch or event participants can draw on the bus, or both!
Animation Hotline
Animation Hotline is an ongoing series of over 200 micro-animations, using crowd-sourced voicemail messages for audio content. This project has been featured at Sundance, screened at the Museum of Modern Art, and premiered in the New York Times (see press below). In this iteration of the project, we would have a phone booth attached to the back of the Animation Bus or potentially a series of phone booths scattered throughout the festival (see below) where festival participants could watch previously created animations and possibly get inspired to leave their own message. These messages could even start getting sourced before the festival (ie. telling stories about their adventures coming to the festival, or what their favorite performance act will be) but could definitely take place during the festival, telling stories about their experiences there, or anything else they want to leave a message about. These messages would then get animated on the side of the Animation Bus (see above) during the course of the festival. Logistical note: participants don’t need to leave a message at the phone booth, there would also be a unique phone number for the festival hotline messages.
New York Times – Ode to Bikesharing
New York Times – Silver
MoMA screening
Sundance Film Festival Installation
Press
Magic Lantern Shows
The animation bus can have an inflatable room built off of the side of it (or we can simply present it outside if it is dark enough) where at night, we would host a magic lantern show. Magic lantern shows (around 1743 until the early 1900s) were the predecessor to animation and used glass-painted slides projected on a wall with narrations. Melissa Ferrari (see work samples) has many magic lantern shows already created, although for the festival we would like to create a new magic lantern show based on a Robert Hunter or Alan Ginsberg poem, including projection, narration, and potentially soundscape.