[This was initially posted in response to the Simple Machine call for microfestival proposals. In the months since, it has morphed into Rush Process Festival of Handcrafted Animation. The call for entries for the first edition opened on April 20, 2015.—Dave]
The Gulf Coast Lo-Fi Animation Festival will celebrate DIY animation production and DIY animated works, with a heavy emphasis on works created by analog or hybrid (analog art + digital assembly) means. The screenings will be mostly curated, though the festival will be open to submissions and will have a competition program as well.

Workshops

Workshops will discuss specific areas of DIY animation production, and approaches to incorporating analog methods into the modern animation production workflow. Potential workshops include:

—Two lo-fi animation jams (one narrative, one abstract experimental), in which attendees will work together to create a paper-based animated short in an afternoon (think it can’t be done? Check out this short made at Beta Theater’s “Make A Movie Night” — it was shot on an iPhone, took 6 people 3 hours to write and produce it start to finish and it’s totally hand drawn http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AINpZmruisI).
— A workshop where attendees will make their own animation lightboxes from cigar boxes and recycled picture frames
— A workshop on setting up a bare-bones home animation studio
—A workshop exploring iPhone-based pencil-testing and, iOS-based animation production more generally
— A crash course in Dream Studio, a completely free, media production-focused Linux distro distributed by Celeum.
— A workshop on producing works in the sub-genre of abstract experimental animation known as visual music
— A 16mm scratch-on-film animation workshop in which attendees make six-second film loops which will be digitized and posted to the festival’s Vine account, as well as Tumblr (as GIFs).

Submission Fee, Or Lack Thereof

There are some start-up, competition-based festivals that seem to be more about their organizers using submission fees from struggling filmmakers as an convenient new source of income rather than simply as a way to raise the bar on submission quality. As I’d like to avoid those types of politics, the submission fee will be set at zero.

Selection Committee

The selection committee will include Austin-based experimental animator Dax Norman (Adult Swim’s “Off The Air”, Punto y Raya Festival, etc.), who will also attend and present a special program of his work.

Background

I started teaching DIY animation at Houston’s Beta Theater in Summer 2013. I had four students — three adults and one 12-year-old. We worked on paper, experimented with pixillation, chalkboard animation, direct animation, walk cycles, and Vine, and we had a blast doing it. I’ll be teaching the class again this Fall and want to grow a community of animators in Houston. This city is the 4th largest in the country, and though there are many visual artists here, only a small percentage are making time-based work. Strangely, there are only a handful of film festivals based in Houston — and none of them focus specifically on animation. Ideally, Gulf Coast Lo-Fi will occur at Beta, a 50-seat black box in a converted former middle-school classroom. See http://betatheater.com for venue info.