Denise Ho
Janelle Monae
Judith Butler
Natalie Wynn
Quarantine animation celebrates LGBTQ+ icons
The CTSG is proud to introduce Modern Queer Heroes – a celebration of contemporary figures in the LGBTQ+ community by University of Brighton School of Media Senior Lecturer Kate Jessop. The newly relesed animation is part two of the original Queer Heroes film which celebrated historical LGBTQ+ figures who had helped push forward art, politics or science in any way. This time Kate’s work is focusing on prominent LGBT+ figures in contemporary culture who are helping shift forward society and bring progress such as Fox Fisher and Chardine Taylor-Stone.
During lock down 14 queer animators around the world came together to celebrate unsung contemporary queer heroes. Each animator nominated a hero, they were then shuffled up and passed back out for each animator to create a 10 second representation of that icon.
The film is based on the ‘Exquisite Corpses’ structure pioneered by old surrealist drawing games whereby each animator animated a 10 second section passing on their last frame to the next animator in order to form the first frame of the next animator’s section, creating an animation chain.
The animators Kate has worked with come from London, New York, Berlin and include both recent graduates and established animation directors such as Laura Jane Hodkin and Cheng-Chung-Hsu. Sam Gurry, one of the animators based in LA, had previously written about the director Kate Jessop in the first ever book released on Queer Animation published by QuickDraw in Canada named ‘On LGBTQ2S Animation’ and also featured Cheng Chung-Hsu.
You can watch Modern Queer Heroes here https://vimeo.com/467051605
About Kate Jessop
Kate Jessop is a multi-award winning animation filmmaker who has had hundreds of international exhibits and has 5 international distribution deals including Shorts International and Amazon Prime. She works across narrative film, comedy, illustration, live visuals, music video and motion design and utilises 2D animation, stop motion and live action in her work.
She represented the UK in the Best of Women in Film and TV and was selected for the Berlinale Talent Lab both with her portfolio as a director and with her comedy series Tales from Pussy Willow chosen for development in the Project Lab. She enjoyed her first retrospective at the Gilbert Baker Film festival in USA 2019.
This project was supported by CTSG seed funding.
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