UGFTV Assistant Professor Emily Ann Hoffman was interviewed in the most recent issue of Filmmaker Magazine, where she spoke about the power of "human-crafted" animation. Earlier this year, Professor Hoffman was chosen as one of the inaugural fellows for the LAIKA x Gotham Animation Accelerator, a new initiative supporting early to mid-career animation creators developing animated short film pitches.
A multidisciplinary artist at heart, the animator Emily Ann Hoffman makes films spanning many mediums at once. Stop-motion animation remains at the core, though she finds her inspiration in disparate places. “It’s so piecemeal,” she says. While an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hoffman took an animation course on a whim, pivoting from an interest in painting and searching for an art form that worked for her. “Through that experience, it all really clicked for me,” she says. “I realized animation—and stop-motion, in particular—was this amazing Venn diagram of all my interests: handcrafting, sculpting things, painting backgrounds, making sets.” Hoffman leapt into making shorts after meeting collaborator and producer Sean Weiner, and her filmography reflects this interest in mixed media. Her short films interpolate different forms, as in Blackheads (2020), which alternates between stop motion and 2D as it tells the story of a woman dealing with the fallout of a breakup, while her stress manifests through an acne breakout and ghostly hand-drawn figures that appear in her room. Other shorts, like Bug Bite (2018), play with live-action photography.