animate! › About commissions

2026 restoration: capture restoration. Sources: Wayback capture.

About

animate! has been commissioning experimental animation films since 1990. It is now developing a resource based around these existing films but which will increasingly extend into the broader area of artist animation. This resource aims to be one of the most comprehensive and highest quality data-sets ever produced for the area, focusing especially on thoughtful practice: process, techniques, goals, ambitions and genres. It will lever the existing archive of films as a starting point for identifying and assessing the wider issues.

This site intends to be the hub of animate!'s activities for exhibition and advocacy, and we plan to solicit information, updates, corrections and extra contextual material from you, the user. We also welcome feedback on our featured material, and contributions and suggestions for articles or projects that are relevant to the further understanding of experimental animation.

Technical summary

animate! is committed to the use of standard, open technologies in the development of both the resource data and the website. In practice we are using a standards-compliant database for storing the data around the film archive, the site structure and its design, whilst developing the controlled vocabularies used for describing the films. This is extensible, open to partnership and collaboration, and in the near future will be channelled into the production of educational & contextual materials beyond the web.

The website itself is dynamically generated from this xml data, using standard stylesheet transformations , and structured using xhtml markup, combined with css for the layout and design. The site is managed using a custom, evolving content management system build around a standard browser interface.