“Some animations leave even the seasoned animator wondering, “How did they do that?” For its masterful use of clay on glass, its elegant command over spatial transitions, and its rich portrayal of shifting perspectives and characters, the Jury awards the prize of Best Commissioned Film to Ten Degrees of Strange, a music video by Lynn Tomlinson, for Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane.” - Anne Koizumi, Jodie Mack, and Kang Min Kim, Competition Shorts Jury, Ottawa International Animation Festival 2021, Winner Best Commissioned Animation
May 6, 2021 sees the release of the extraordinary video by US clay-animation artist Lynn Tomlinson, to accompany ‘Ten Degrees of Strange, the lead single from Lost in the Cedar Wood – the fifth album from Johnny Flynn, written in collaboration with his friend Robert Macfarlane. Johnny and Robert say: "‘Ten Degrees of Strange’ is a song about trying to outrun anxiety, seeking joy and strength in landscape and movement. We fell in love with Lynn’s work after coming across it by chance. Her unique clay-on-glass animation technique lends itself so beautifully to the themes and rhythms of the song. Clay runs as a motif through our album – it is the material of transformations and re-figurings, and it formed the ancient tablets on which the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of our song-writing inspirations, was first recorded. So it made perfect sense to ask Lynn, an artist working miracles with clay, to create our video. She’s made a minor masterpiece, we think: a music video like no other." Lynn Tomlinson comments, "One of the unexpected benefits of the pandemic is that isolation forces us to find creative ways to work together, such as this international collaboration, devised entirely through emails and video chats. Robert and Johnny reached out to me about the possibility of creating a film to accompany their song. As a medium, clay holds a lot of power — its malleability allows me to transition fluidly from scene to scene, much as the natural world shifts and evolves over time. In many ways my clay on glass animation is naturally suited for telling stories about the passage of time, evolving perspectives, and cycles in nature. ‘Ten Degrees of Strange’ is a wonderful song, full of energy and nuance, and though I listened to it hundreds of times as I worked, it never lost its magic."
AWARDS:
Best Animation, 75th UFVA Conference

INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS:
- Annecy International Animation Festival, 2022
- Maryland Film Festival, 2022
- Sommets du Cinema d'Animation, Montreal, 2022
- Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2022
- Athens International Film and Video Festival, 2022
- Ocean City Film Festival, 2022
- London International Animation Festival, 2021
- GIRAF Animation Festival, 2021
- Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival, 2021
- Ottawa International Animation Festival, 2021
- Fantoche, Animated Music Video Darlings
- ANIMA, Córdoba International Animation Festival, 2021
- ANIMAFILM International Animation Festival, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2021
- Chesapeake Film Festival, Easton, MD, 2021
- ANIMASYROS International Animation Festival, 2021
- Insomnia International Animation Film Festival, Moscow 2021

Director: Lynn Tomlinson
Producers: Lynn Tomlinson, Craig Saper
Animators: Lynn Tomlinson, Lucy Saper

"The Elephant's Song" tells the true and tragic tale of Old Bet, the first circus elephant in America, as recounted in song by her friend the old farm dog.  The verses of the elephant's song are animated frame-by-frame with plasticine clay spread thinly on sheets of glass. The choruses are animated using oil pastels colored over printed frames of video.

Produced and Animated by Lynn Tomlinson
Story co-written with Sam Saper
Music written by Sam Saper
Music performed by Trucker Talk (Abby Becker, Greg Bowen, Jessica Keyes, and Rich Kolm) with vocals by Deletta Gillespie and Brooks Long.
Music recorded and engineered by Shea Springer, Sweetfoot Studio
Artist's Statement: When I first heard the story of  Old Bet, the only elephant in America from 1805-1816, and the menagerie that started the American circus, I was touched by the lonely image of this elephant, the only one of her kind, a social animal all alone in a strange land with no way to communicate her memories of her home. It seemed like a timely and poignant story to tell, with the closure of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, following soon after they had retired all of their performing elephants. Old Bet was carried over the sea, sold to a farmer who first thought she could work his fields, then paraded her up the East Coast in the first traveling menagerie in North America. I went on a research trip to Somers, NY, a beautiful town in the Hudson River Valley, called the “Cradle of the American Circus,” to the site of the Elephant Hotel, which the elephant’s owner, Hachaliah Bailey, built as a center for this new business of exhibiting exotic animals. Following his success, his neighbors soon owned giraffes, hippos, camels…. all living in their pastoral New York State fields and barns. I also discovered that at the same time as Old Bet’s journey, Charles Wilson Peale, an artist and naturalist who had the first museum in America, was excavating a mastodon skeleton right on the other side of the Hudson river. I was moved by the idea that Old Bet walking on the land that held the bones of her extinct ancestors. My film alludes to this long history and other related themes, like the ivory trade, in the choruses, using oil pastel on video prints to preserve the reality of the reference images, while Old Bet’s story is told in the verses in vibrant clay-on-glass animation, a stop-motion process using colored modelling clay spread thinly on glass sheets. Old Bet’s song, written by Sam Saper and performed by the band Trucker Talk with vocals by Deletta Gillespie and Brooks Long, draws on American folk, blues and spiritual musical traditions. My clay-on-glass animation involves both planning and improvisation. It’s a bit like finger painting, using warm modeling clay that looks like thick oil paint. It is a stop-motion process, meaning that I create an initial painting, and then alter it bit by bit to create the movement. The process is both creative and destructive: As I change the image, the original is changed over and over until it no longer exists. I spend about three hours under the camera to make one second of finished animation. Often, instead of a storyboard or movement pencil test, I edit a video-mashup-from found video mixed with artworks and historical photos. Sometimes I use this video collage as a rough guide, and other times I actually rotoscope or trace the movement, to add a life-like quality to my moving paintings.This film combines both clay-on-glass animation with oil pastel over video prints to capture a sense of photographic reality. Because the film is set in the Hudson River Valley in the 1800s, I looked at paintings by early American painters like Edward Hicks and the Hudson River School for inspiration.  Completed May, 2018, World Premiere at the Maryland Film Festival. Awards include: First Prize - Made in Baltimore Film Festival at the Creative Alliance; Global Insights Stellar Award - Black Maria Film Festival; Best of Festival and Best Animation - Peekskill Film Festival, Best Animation - University Film and Video Association; Best Sound Design and Best Environmental Short Animation - Chesapeake Film Festival, Experimental Animation Second Prize - Los Angeles Animation Festival. International Screenings include: Animation for Peace at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival; Ajyal Youth Film Festival in Doha, Qatar; Wildlife Vaasa Festival in Finland, Edmonton International Film Festival, Canada; Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York, UK; Xiamen International Animation Festival, China.

Animation: Lynn Tomlinson
Lyrics: Lynn Tomlinson
Music: Anna Roberts-Gevalt with Elizabeth LaPrelle

The Ballad of Holland Island House tells the true story of the last house on a sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay, brought to life through fluidly transforming animated clay-on-glass paintings. The house sings of its life and the creatures it has sheltered, and contemplates time and environmental change. Told from the house's point of view, this film is a soulful and haunting view of the impact of sea-level rise.


Process:
My clay-on-glass animation involves both planning and improvisation. It’s a bit like finger painting, using warm modeling clay that looks like thick oil paint. It is a stop-motion process, meaning that I create an initial painting, and then alter it bit by bit to create the movement. The process is both creative and destructive: As I change the image, the original is changed over and over until it no longer exists. When I spend three hours to make one second of finished animation, I enter a state of flow, concentrating on altering the malleable clay, changing it slowly, frame by frame. For this film, instead of a storyboard or movement pencil test, I edited a video-mashup-collage animatic I edited from found video fragments (of trees falling, boats rocking, crab feasts and model ships sinking) with well-known artworks and historical photos. Sometimes I used this video collage as a rough guide, and other times I actually rotoscoped or traced the movement, to add a life-like quality to my moving paintings.

A haunting photograph I saw on the internet inspired this story: a house standing alone in the water. Reading more about this particular house, I was struck by its story, and its relevance today, when so many communities are facing challenges from sea-level rise. The painterly, expressive, visual style reflects the artwork of Winslow Homer, VanGogh, and Kathe Kolwitz, artists working in the late 1800's, the time period when the house on Holland Island was abandoned. I wrote the lyrics to the ballad and began the animation for this film while on a two-week artist residency at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, across the bay from the remains of Holland Island. I created this film from start to finish in two months: two very intensive months!

A live visual theater performance/installation blending animation, ceramic sculpture, underwater plastic-bottle puppets, live video feed, and multiple projections. The process and the product are created live on stage simultaneously, creating an immersive world from the hive-minded perspective of the jellyfish. Low-tech meets high-tech, digital meets DIY, building a speculative Post-Anthroposcene environment: a Neo-Precambrian world of human remains where jellyfish rule the sea.

Aqua Dome is a pedagogical collaborative interdisciplinary project that premiered in Towson University's Watson-King Planetarium in December 2018.

Aqua Dome is a collaborative animated dome-film and artwork. Working with over 150 collaborators across disciplines and age groups, Aqua Dome combines mixed-media stop motion animation and animated kaleidoscopic collage video projection with an immersive soundscape in four movements.

Aqua Dome was conceived of and directed by Lynn Tomlinson (EMF), Zoe Friedman (Art Department) and Elsa Lankford (EMF). It is edited and composited by Kat Navarro (Baltimore School for the Arts). The first public screening will be projected in the Watson King Planetarium, kindly facilitated by Professor Alex Storrs in Astronomy. Multi-displinary in nature, Aqua Dome was selected for the first Towson University College of Fine Art and Communication CoLAB interdisciplinary project grant.

Artist Statement:
I was excited by the creative possibilities of the space, which has much in common with VR, but unlike that solitary activity (with goggles, etc.) watching a dome film is a communal experience. The spark for this specific project began with a Ruby’s grant proposal I wrote. When I didn’t receive that grant to make a dome-film of my own, I decided it would be fun to try something similar with students, so I adapted my proposal to fit COFAC’s new CoLab grant, and we were fortunate to receive funding. I reached out to my colleagues and collaborators Elsa Lankford and Zoe Friedman. We also collaborated with students from Baltimore School for the Arts, working with teacher Kat Navarro, who edited and composited the entire video. Kat understood our kaleidoscopic, DIY approach to making the video fit the dome format. She took our creative ideas and materials and ran with it.

Madalines' Stilts is a fairy tale: an overly optimistic fantasy about human adaptation in the face of sea-level rise. A grandmother, mother, and daughter live in a hut by the sea. How can they change to survive in their increasingly watery world?

The piece was created by a three-generation collaboration of grandmother-mother-daughter artists, who all share the name "Madaline." This was a bi-coastal collaboration, using both tactile and digital media, and reflects the concerns of both coasts in a time of storms, tsunamis, and sea change. The team first shot video of their silhouettes against a white background, and then edited and composited this video with paint and clay-on-glass animation. The artists shared inspiration and communicated online via Skype, email, Pinterest, and Dropbox. They discussed each scene and how it should look, sharing reference images, and Lynn taught Madaline via Skype to use stop-motion animation software and a DSLR camera to capture her moving paintings. Madaline painted and animated the background in Santa Cruz, CA and sent it online to Lynn in Catonsville, MD, where she made the finished product. Lynn collaged the silhouettes; the waves; the words; and also manipulated the animation to make a cohesive whole. Lucy acted in the film and helped her mother with the editing. They enjoyed working together as a three-generation artistic team.

Lucy Madaline Saper is a seventh-grade student at the Jemicy School in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a visual artist, actress, and stilt-walker. Lynn (Madaline Carol) Tomlinson is an interdisciplinary artist working in animation, sculpture, and mixed media arts. . Her award-winning animated and documentary films have been screened at numerous festivals, and her clay-on-glass animated shorts have aired on children’s public television, MTV, and Sesame Street. Madaline Borrebach Tomlinson (Vassar, ’64) is an interdisciplinary artist known for her face-painting and acrylics. She is also an attorney, and a founding member of a ukelele group in Santa Cruz, CA.

Lynn Tomlinson was a Segment Director for Fired Up! Her segment is the blue part where the umbrella blows inside out.
Fired Up is a short animated film that depicts the origin story of President Obama’s famed “Fired up, ready to go” chant.

On a rainy day in June of 2007, President Obama found himself speaking to a subdued crowd in the tiny town of Greenwood, SC. He was exhausted, soaking wet, and beginning to doubt the whole campaign when a voice called out from the back, “Fired up, ready to go!”. The chant, started by one unassuming woman in a church hat, transformed the audience and went on to become a rallying cry in every corner of America.

With the audio of President Obama’s speech as the soundtrack, the film combines original animation by 13 artists from around the world.

Directed and Produced by Dan Fipphen and Elyse KellyAnimation directors (in order of appearance): Emily Eckstein & Ege Alper, Alex Silver, Lynn Tomlinson, The Duke & The Duck, Amy Lee Ketchum, Juan Camilo Gonzalez, Musa Brooker, Miguel Jiron, Sara Spink, Lou Morton, and Daniela Sherer.