Room 1A Campo Boario, 9:30–13:30
Schedule of sessions:
Saturday 7 December 2024 – Igor Imhoff
Saturday 14 December 2024 – Beatrice Pucci
Saturday 11 January 2025 – Magda Guidi
Saturday 18 January 2025 – Luca Della Grotta
Saturday 25 January 2025 – Leonardo Carrano
Saturday 1 February 2025 – final lecture by the curator with online contributions from a number of animators including Donato Sansone, Virgilio Villoresi and Roberto Catani
In the collective imagination, the term “animation cinema” is strongly linked to children’s, television and commercial animation, but in reality there is a type of animation that goes beyond this stereotype. These are independent and often self-financed productions, experimental works also made by artists, which are not very visible, despite being disseminated through the network of international festivals or other channels (such as the web). This type of Italian animation is certainly a form of excellence.
The workshop Il mouse e la matita was created out of the need to offer students an overview of Italian auteur animation, in all its aspects and nuances. But also to fill a gap within the academy’s teaching, since – apart from digital animation – there is no specific course dedicated to animation cinema, which is mostly made using traditional techniques, despite the fact that it is linked to drawing, painting and the relationship with the visual arts.
The aim of the workshop is to allow students to interact with 5 Italian directors from different generations who use different techniques, ranging from abstract painting on film (as in the case of Leonardo Carrano) to animation that interacts with new technologies and AI (Imhoff), from animated drawing (Guidi) to puppet animation (Pucci) and animation of a more narrative nature that interfaces with the official production circuit (Della Grotta).
The sessions – which will last about 4 hours each – will address aesthetic, technical, production and distribution issues, but also issues related to how works related to animation can be presented in exhibition and museum contexts.
The workshop is open to students of all courses upon registration up to a maximum of 100 students.
Having already reached the maximum number of registrations, if there are other interested students, consideration will be given to broadcasting the sessions on Teams.
Only students who attend all the sessions in person will be awarded 1 CFA.
Biographies of the creators
Leonardo Carrano (Rome, 1958). After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, he began working as a painter and graphic designer, and received his first prestigious recognition in 1980 with the Lubian prize awarded by Renato Guttuso. Since 1992, he has been working in experimental animation cinema; his works, the result of the combination of different techniques and forms of expression, all experimental and halfway between abstract and referential, were soon noticed by critics and selected for important festivals in Italy and abroad (Venice Film Festival, Rome, Locarno, Montreal, Paris, Zagreb, Casablanca, Shanghai, Beijing, Milan, Naples, Palermo). His animations have been broadcast several times on a number of RAI programmes, such as Blob and Fuori orario. In 1994, he created the virtual sets for the programme L’angelo for Fininvest. In his creations, Carrano has collaborated with well-known composers such as Sylvano Bussotti, Giorgio Bastianelli, Ennio and Andrea Morricone. His films include Awen (1995), Pentesilea (1997), Il cerchio e la soglia (1999), Noiselevel (2002), Jazz for a massacre (2014), Medea (2017) and the recent Freelm (2024). He also made Aeterna (2012), a medium-length film based on the 14 movements of Mozart’s Requiem, and the VR Experience Mani Materia Memoria, with the vocal participation of Antonio Rezza. Finally, Carrano has staged several solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions in numerous institutional spaces.
Luca Della Grotta graduated from a classical secondary school and began his career as a freelancer in the field of visual communication in 2002 as a graphic designer for the web and publishing, but almost immediately switched to motion graphics for the commercial, cultural and museum sectors, which he worked in for years. He later moved into visual effects for music videos and commercials. In the years that followed, his passion for cinema led him to specialise in visual effects, to collaborate on visual effects for various films, and with various companies, as a digital artist, and then to formalise his position at Chromatica, where he currently works. To date, he has participated in the production of about 55 films. In 2008, he collaborated with “vision digital” on the creation of the VFX for the film Il Divo, with which he won his first David di Donatello for best visual effects. In 2013, he won a second David di Donatello with Chromatica for best visual effects with the film La grande bellezza. In Cualmente, he holds the position of digital effects supervisor and digital artist at Chromatica, while continuing to cultivate his passion for independent productions and animation in all its forms. In 2016, he founded and opened his own school of digital creativity: Artithesi. Luca believes that young people are the real resource to be trained and jealously guarded.
Magda Guidi graduated from the ISA in Urbino, in the Animated Cinema section, and subsequently attended the two-year postgraduate course in Animated Cinema. She then made a number of animated short films, which were selected for numerous Italian and international festivals: Sì, però… (2000), Nuova identità (2003), a video clip for the Italian band Tre allegri ragazzi morti, Ecco, è ora (2004, winner of the Castelli Animati award). In 2005, she designed an animated sequence for the short film Il nano più alto del mondo directed by Francesco Amato. In 2009, together with Andrea Petrucci and Sergio Gutierrez, she made a 45-minute animated film for the theatrical performance L’ultima volta che vidi mio padre, directed by Chiara Guidi (Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio). Via Curiel 8 (2010), co-directed with Mara Cerri, won the award for best short film at the Turin Film Festival in 2011. In 2014, the Pesaro International Festival of New Cinema dedicated a retrospective to her, and she also designed the poster for that edition of the Festival. In 2016, she made Scavami dentro, an animated video clip for Danio Manfredini. In the commercial sectors, she has been collaborating for years on the production of animated clips for theme songs and commercials. She has held animation workshops at the Cineteca di Bologna and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. She has been teaching Animated Cinema at ISIA in Urbino since 2018. His drawings have been exhibited in numerous art galleries in Italy and abroad, including: Fondazione Pescheria Centro Arti Visive (Pesaro), Galleria Tricromia (Rome), Galleria Restarte (Bologna, BilBOlBul International Comics Festival), Lop Loy Gallery (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), Blu Galley (Bologna).
Igor Imhoff. Born in San Giovanni Rotondo in 1976, he is currently a lecturer in Multimedia Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. He is also a collaborator at the International School of Comics in Padua, where he is responsible for the animation and 3D modelling courses. At the same time, he works as a graphic designer and 2D and 3D animator. Imhoff’s artistic activity is dedicated to video research, both in animated cinema and in areas more closely linked to audiovisual experimentation. He has taken part in numerous exhibitions and reviews (Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Galleria San Marco, Venice; Triennale di Milano; Galleria A+A, Venice; Rassegna Video Arte DVDrops, Hong Kong, Bologna, Ferrara; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shanghai, Museu Belas Artes de São Paulo, etc.), film and animation festivals (such as Clermont Ferrand, Annecy, Animateka, Animamudi, Ibrida, etc.), receiving mentions and awards. His works include the Percorsi series, created between 2003 and 2010, Small White Dots (2011), Planets (2012) and Kurgan (2013). But in recent years, Imhoff’s work has been oriented mainly towards interactive installations based on Artificial Intelligence.
Beatrice Pucci is a stop-motion animation filmmaker, sculptor and illustrator. She lives and works between the Marche Apennines and Emilia. Her animated short film Soil is Alive was one of the five finalists at the Nastri d’Argento in 2016. She has participated in numerous national and international festivals including the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. She worked for cinema with an animated insert in Alina Marazzi’s film Tutto parla di te. She has made two music videos, for the singer-songwriter Alessandro Fiori and for the pianist Kekko Fornarelli. His sculptures and drawings have been exhibited in Italy and abroad. She recently began an artistic research project on folk tales inspired by the text of Italio Calvino. Le nozze di Pollicino, the first fairy tale created as part of the Flip project, was one of the three finalists at the Nastri d’Argento and selected for several festivals. In 2009, 2012 and 2016, he exhibited at the Galleria D406 Arte Contemporanea in Modena. In 2013 at the Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea Luogo 0 in San Marino. In 2013 at the Galleria Tricromia in Rome, in 2014 at the Spazio Meme in Carpi, in 2017 at the Galleria Russi in Ravenna. In 2018 at the Pescheria Visual Arts Centre in Pesaro. In the same year, a retrospective was dedicated to her with all her short films as part of the 54th Pesaro International Festival of New Cinema.