Pushing the boundaries of drawing in traditional animation – a dialogue with the aesthetic quality of different mediums to achieve diverse expressive results.
While introducing my work and my path towards being a visual artist and animation filmmaker, I show three different drawing techniques, focusing especially on charcoal and frame per frame traditional hand drawn animation, explaining why I chose to stick to traditional hand drawn animation and what each technique entails and offers, in the perspective of telling a story that through the moving image increases its abstract, emotional untold part.
Gaia Alari is a filmmaker, visual artist, art director and animator of short films and music videos (in traditional 2d hand drawn frame per frame animation or clay animation) based in Milan, Italy. Since 2012, in parallel with her academic studies in Medicine, she pursued drawing and illustration as a self taught, collaborating traditionally with art galleries all over Europe (in particular Galleri Benoni, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Galerie Anouk Le Bourdiec, Paris, France) and, inspired by the works of artists as William Kentridge, Nathalie Djurberg and Lauren Kelley, as well as contemporary cinema and filmmakers, since 2018 she has been dedicating to creating and directing experimental music videos and short films with the technique of clay animation and since 2020 in traditional hand drawn frame per frame animation, mainly as a one woman crew.
She regularly collaborates with international musicians and labels, ex Nonesuch Records (Warner USA), SaddleCreek +Nextdoor Records. Amongst her commercial works, she creates original ltd products in partnership with Quotamine (Paris based skate crew and brand) and she directed and animated a legacy video in partnership with YOOX – NET – A – PORTER on the occasion of the YOOX founder’s retirement from the Group. In 2018 her debut short film “Happy” was officially selected for screening at several festivals: MicroActs London, 4th Athens Animation Marathon, Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin, Lisbon Film Rendezvous, Mirror Mountain Film Festival.
Her second short form clay animation “Terminus” premiered at AVIFF Cannes (France) and was awarded the special “Prix AVIFF Incognito” in May, 2019. It was exhibited for Galerie Incognito at the Monnaie de Paris. Her animated music clip “I talk to the wind” for Dana Gavanski (2020) made it to the official selection of Sound Unseen film and music festival, 21st edition (in the 25 coolest film festival of the world list by MovieMaker Magazine) and received a nomination for Best Music Video at San Francisco Frozen Film Festival and was shortlisted at the Academy award and Canadian screen award qualifying festival AIFVF. In 2021 her short animated poetry film “Tethered” based on the eponymous poem by James C. Morehead was awarded Best animated short at London Web Fest, a honourable mention at International Smyrna Film Festival and Prague Film Festival Awards. It was selected to be screened at the Kulturhuset Islands Brygge in Copenhagen and within the Animattikon Project festival in Cyprus. She is currently working on her debut narrative short animation.
She is interested in exploring, throughout her narrative and experimental short animations, the relationship between the individual, more often a girl/woman, and society in its various aspects, with a special focus on contemporary loneliness in everyday life.