JUNE 2025 - STARS is at BRIXTON HOUSE!
STARS
I met Mojisola Abedayo when I was working with Idle Women back in 2016. We pulled a narrow boat up a canal together. Mojisola was the summer Artist in Residence that year, researching and developing the show that would become STARS. A big framed portrait of Mae Jemison looking elated, defying gravity in a shuttle hung on the wall of Selina Cooper. Moj was already playing with the idea of using animation in the production and when she met me, graphic scribe for Idle Women, our fates were sealed.
This is the earliest version of the animation, I think from 2017. It’s all ink on paper in tiny boxes that I could digitise on my little A4 scanner and trace against the window pane of my Dewsbury bedsit. It’s interesting to see how many ideas from these first blush concepts would live on to the first staging in 2023.
This is a trailer I quickly cut for STARS the film’s festival circuit.
‘An Afrofuturist Space Odyssey’ and a ‘concept album on stage’ STARS became a production like no other. The animation soon outgrew it’s frantic hand-drawn roots but some of the original sequences from that moment, pencil drawn and then inverted into white on black, survived into the final film. Finally though, I used a wacom to drawn the frames and the ‘mirror’ function in photoshop to speed up the process.
The larger blocks of animation from the play were cut into a short film, premiering at Berlinale 2025 before going off into the world.
As the show grew in complexity, my photoshop skills were upgraded upgraded to incorporate After Effects. At the time, there wasn’t really a program like it for quickly creating quite complex animation and it saved my life. The play, now in rehearsals under the watchful eye of directors Gail Babb and Ama Ray, was changing quickly with new visuals being imagined on a daily basis. I remember spending long hours in the Westminster Reference Library trying to get everything finished.
The above sequence plays with Jamila Woods ‘Way Up’ (thank you DJ Trouble and WFMU) so listen to it while you watch the clip if you want the immersive experience.
