Jodie Mack works in experimental animation, and the focus of those efforts can be distilled to understanding a single question: What does it mean to be alive? "I feel every object has a soul that can be unleashed in cinema," she muses. "Animation is such a beautiful way of making films and thinking about life."
Professor Mack specializes in animation and animation history as well as avant-garde cinema, a mode of filmmaking that challenges conventional cinematic techniques. Her years in the field have taught her that animation is an art used to study and rationalize an ever-changing world. "I really came to a new understanding of animation as this place to think about constant change," she says.
In addition to animation classes, Professor Mack is currently teaching courses that, in effect, serve as bookends to the four-year experience of students in the film and media studies department, including Introduction to Film: From Script to Screen and a culminating experience seminar for thesis students. One of her favorites to teach is Water in the Lake: Real Events for the Imagination, a film class offered in partnership with the studio art and music departments.
"We treat the entire class like an artistic collective," she says, adding that the assignments help students explore different mediums like video, painting, and sound pieces. The class even works as a group to care for a garden, using the plants to create cyanotypes, a type of photographic print. At the end of the 10-week term, students display their work in a large-scale professional exhibition of their work at the Black Family Visual Arts Center.
In her own work, Professor Mack has experimented with various types of animating. "Bringing life to objects where there is none is something that has really fascinated me," she says—a nod perhaps to the objects that make up personal collections, like fabric, that often appear as motifs in her work. In an homage to her home state, Professor Mack is currently working on a film that tells the story of change in what was once the quaint sponge-diving community of Tarpon Springs, Florida.
It's that sentiment of change and growth, of creation and destruction, that drives Professor Mack's philosophy as a teacher and an animator. "I think my department is particularly hungry to welcome new students," she shares, noting that the film and media studies department has more than doubled in size over the past six years. "Animation and art and filmmaking can be really amazing social and cultural barometers to help us understand our role as humans during our time here on this earth," she says. "It's a beautiful thing to remember that everyone is an animator with the capacity to bring ideas and projects into being."
Photograph by Don Hamerman
