Melissa Kitty Jarram

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0:12everyone hear me cool so my name is Melissa Kathy Jarrow and I'm an illustrator and artist based in London and on the screen behind me you'll be able to see examples of what my work looks like in various projects that I've worked on.

0:30But I'm here to talk to you today mainly about my project with Anna Ginsberg she is an amazing animator and director and we produced a film called ugly which was a depiction of the poem by warson Shia so I saw Anna's work on Instagram and we kind of fangirled each other a little bit.

0:56But then when I met her in real life it was at a pub and through mutual friends and I think I actually I broke my arm and so everyone was racing on my cast and they did the classic like drawing penises on it and Anna came along and drew bagina and then.

1:15That's when I knew like she's my kind of girl so we started talking to each other about how much we liked each other's work and what we liked about it.

1:23And then decided that we wanted to do a collaboration such an EB Gann so I thought that she wanted to use my digital illustrations cuz that would have been so much easier but then she was like no what she likes about my work for my paintings and I was like okay well. That's absolutely pencil how can you reproduce them digitally and so she did a test and this was the result and as you can see it's kind of like spot the difference except everyone would lose because there is absolutely no difference so the talent that she had really got me excited when I saw this.

2:05And then we produced a test to see if it could work ♪

2:24so as you can see she really made my paintings can come to life which was something that I really had no idea anyone could do and so then we started talking about what we could do with this project.

2:36And initially we were thinking let's make a bunch of gifts which kind of then evolved into making short stories about stuff but then eventually evolved into the idea of animating a poem so we neither of us being poetry fanatics started going through a loathe of poems and landed on wild geese by Mary Oliver which actually meant a lot to Anna and it was full of really beautiful imagery about nature and coming to terms with solitude and being okay with yourself so it's also wearing really true for like feelings that I had too.

3:14So we started working on that and strange beasts production saw the test and they got interested because she'd worked with them several times before and really kindly they offered as a budget but Chris said they they offered to fund it for us.

3:32But the problem with that although we were obviously really psyched and grateful for it was that we had to then get rights to use the poem so they put together this amazing treatment and sent it over to Mary Oliver's agent who replied with a very short email saying no basically so Anna and I were a bit gutted about this.

3:55But we were thinking you know this can't let us stop the project we're gonna have to try everything we can and Anna's cut in from America was really resourceful and managed to find her home address for us.

4:09So we were like okay well why don't we just send her a letter and propose the project and send some original paintings and these were the paintings that we and I had posted the envelope and we were really excited about sending it off on a Thursday morning January the 17th I went to the post office and off it went and I sent the videos of it literally leaving leaving our hands and later on in the afternoon breaking news Mary Oliver died that day so we were just like oh my god is this is this awful like what's going on or like are we being Punk'd I was searching for Ashton Kutcher so really that was the end of that and she was really disheartened and I was thinking you know this can't be we can't let us stop it let's go back to the drawing board and find another poem which Anna did and she found this amazing poem called ugly by Lawson Shia and Lawson Shia an award-winning British poet who was born to smiley parents in Kenya and a lot of her work was about being like the experience of being a migrant she moved to the UK and the problems and difficulties she had with integration especially from a woman's perspective so this poem I think it was a bit difficult because it was quite serious and sad but it did have an uplifting ending and it covered topics like it was really empathetic to the experience of what it was like being a migrant but on top of that it questioned perceptions of beauty and above all I think on a wider scale it was kind of dealing with trauma and how trauma can really destroy your confidence and make it hard for you to soar get on with life and and then make you feel really really bad like self-confidence issues and things like that. But in the end I had quite an uplifting ending which is that there's a lot of beauty in strength so we decided to go with this and again we had to approach her agent so we sent the treatment over and her agent replied saying no and we're like okay let's let's try an email heron contact her directly so we did that.

6:52And I reply we slid into her DMS on Instagram and it was always like unread but luckily I was looking at her profile and I noticed that it was a business profile which meant that her phone number was on there. So it clicked on it. And I noticed that it was a it's a number from LA which is where she lives so I was like what the hell I'll text her.

7:16So I texted her this message proposing our idea and the reasons why we really wanted to work with her and use this poem in particular and she got back to me straightaway and she was like this sounds great it loves to work with you let me speak to my agent but how did you get my number so he explained like oh I'm a message talker and I found it on Instagram and she was like well thanks so much and removed it immediately so we began the project. And we worked really closely together I don't know if you can see these pictures very well because they're sketches from my sketchbook. So adarand I were going through all the imagery and together we sort of formed ideas on how it was going to look and and what was going to happen so I did a lot of drawings and sent them over to Anna who then turned them into an animatic and after we did this the problem then was coloring which was literally like solving a Rubik's Cube so I don't work sequentially and I'm usually like where can we still image but it was my job to do the style frames and the paintings so I found it really difficult then to sort of develop color that would flow from one scene to another but still look good because in one painting it could wreak great but then as their shapes or change the bowers is a color changed too. And so we found it really difficult to sort sort that out.

8:54And in the end I was like repainting things which was taking ages until we remembered that. There was a Paint Bucket so we used the stills from the animatic and together with Becky from strange beasts who is one of the producers the three of us will go through them all and discover which ones we liked which ones we didn't like which ones worked and just made it really easier for me to sort of go ahead and paint the actual the scenes so to give you a perspective on how much work went into it I'd said close to a hundred original paintings give and take and they all took an average of about five hours to make and then on the animation side the more intricate frames could take up to an hour to color digitally so with 12 frames a second that's 12 hours to make one single second animation at this point so Anna and I weren't making any money from this we had jobs that we had to do on the side to support ourselves and I do some engineering work on the site I was booked out for field trips you can collect like magnetic data on oil and gas piping and this was right and like towards the end of the project. So that cut my timeline short so much and my life became like just waking up and painting and I had to choose between waking up and having a shower or having breakfast and I often chose breakfast so I stank a lot. But also Anna have her own gourmet issues at the time so as we all know brat is shot wrath you which incidentally rhymes with rat poo and this is a really iconic moment in the process of our filmmaking today we were working late in the studio a lot and accidentally a rap hoop and we panics but it was okay because I mean it's not there.

11:05But I made a meme about it which is pure scientific evidence that rap who was solely responsible for the success applause I hope so because this topic is the poem that we were working on was dealing with something that was so intimate to to the the writer but also with the current refugee crisis I felt like all of us felt like there was something more we could do with it.

11:34So we didn't want our screening to be about our film in particular and we wanted to give a platform to other artists especially like migrants and refugees to be able to show their work and talk about it in a wider context so thanks to Sam gray from strange peace he helped us organize this event for our screening and really kindly the tram free on all street men as their venue and for free so we sold it as a ticketed event and we managed to raise a lot of money for council points which is an amazing charity but before that these were the films that we showed as well you should check them out definitely they're all about the experience of what it's like to be a refugee or migrant and integrating society so council point arts is a leading national organization in the field of arts migration and cultural change and their mission is to support and produce the arts by and about migrants and refugees seeking to ensure that their contributions are recognized and welcomed within British arts history and culture and I feel like art is really at the heart of culture and a really useful tool to communicate different perspectives and by doing that you know we can challenge opinions and it helps us begin to understand other people and at the risk of sounding super cliche I really believe that helping people understand things better my ultimately help us all treat each other better as well.

13:12So the film was shown at screening and Glastonbury Festival it was shown at a screening and at an event that was organized by print Cup London in Somerset House in support of a charity called choose love which was again a charity supporting the refugee crisis and here is ugly your daughter is ugly she knows loss intimately carries a whole city's in her belly as a child relatives wouldn't hold her she was splintered wood and sea water she reminded them of the world on her 15th birthday you taught her how to tie her hair like rope and smoke it over burning frankincense you made her gargle rosewater and while she coughed said mantle girls like you shouldn't smell of lonely or empty you are her mother why did you not warn her hold her like a rotten boat and tell her that men will not love her if she is covered incontinence if her teeth are small economies if a stomach is an island if her thighs are borders what man wants to lie down and watch the world burn in his bedroom your daughter's face is small riot her hands are a civil war a refugee camp behind each ear a body littered with ugly things but God doesn't she wear the world well ♪

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15:21you [Applause]