Exploring Affect in Stop Frame Animation

The text explores affect as it unfolded for Master students, co-authoring this article, while engaging with personally meaningful objects, making their first animation movie, and reflecting on this process in the light of new materialist theories. The text is an experiment, emerging from a collective process of living animation making, and intensely discussing, co-thinking and co-writing about this experience. The text attempts to make tangible this complex process, and it aims to share with the reader the potential of animation making as a source of affect, emerging from a temporary assemblage of people and things joint in co-creation and co-agentive collaboration, driven by affective intensities. It aims, furthermore, to recommend animation making as a powerful tool to put in motion learners and learning about materiality, time, space, and our connections with things and people, spurred by affect as a driving force that pushes us towards discovery. The text ultimately seeks to propose an approach towards learning and understanding literacy that takes impetus and grounding from the forces of living, open to the unforeseen and unpredictable, and based in processes of immanence, emergence and movement, rather than in stasis and pre-meditated design.