Fire Scar (46 sec) Drawn from charcoal collected on site, the inset drawings from the Fire Scars animation depict real trees and stumps, showing the aftermath of a prescribed burn. New life flourishes outside the drawn frame. Combining hand drawings, video, and digital effects, this animation style was useful for showing two timelines at once; one imagined the recent past and the other in real time.

Light (1 min) The Light animation uses stop-motion pastel drawings, each new frame drawn over the previous. Pastel lends itself to a loose rendering of the forest, focusing on the shifting color and texture as the forest is shown in the different light. Working in this method complemented the story of a forest burn, as changes made to the drawing are irreversible, and create something new as they move forward.

Wind (38 sec) This animation uses video collage exclusively to show different layers of a red pine forest and how they act in the wind. Shooting the videos provided the opportunity to spend time observing the pines up close.

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Drawing Fire

Great Lakes Design Lab  - Research Assistant

Summer 2023

This project utilizes animation to explore some of the spatial and experiential relationships associated with fire management near the Old Growth Canopy Trail project at the Cloquet Forestry Center in Northern Minnesota.

The animation examined and played with dynamic conditions such as the way light conditions change in a fire event, the way wind patterns play with the trees or how the fire scars carry forward a memory of a bur within the forest This project was born out of observations made during the Designing Fire Workshop and was developed over the summer of 2023.