BAFTA nomination: Blitz (American Football)

Reflecting on my BAFTA nomination

I find it painful (but interesting) to look back on my career before my traumatic marriage, attempted murder, subsequent PTSD, hand injury, breakdown, and other traumas within the UK mental health system. I write about this in the forthcoming publication Autoethnographic Animation and the Metabolism of Trauma (Routledge), but here simply reflect on how animation, including these titles, helped me cope with these events.

The titles were commissioned by Trans World International for a bi-weekly show featuring American Football that screened on Channel 4 from 1994-1998. Initially the commission raised eyebrows in those who assumed I could only animate dance. Although not a sports fan, as I studied the game of American Football, I quickly realised it was full of dynamic movement and was as rewarding to animate as dance. And it was full of drama, which I highlighted by using my skills in animated metamorphosis to transform the Detroit Lions, Buffalo Bills, and Los Angeles Rams, from beast to man and back again, whilst pitched in internecine combat. I worked on this project for four years, incorporating into the body of the programme a combination of my pencil animation, 'negative' versions of the artwork, new animation, and short stings that uniquely identified every team in the NFL. I received a BAFTA nomination for Best Graphic Design in 1995 for the magazine version of this show titled 'Blitz (American Football).'

Background to commission

I started work on this commission in 1994, at the outset of my disastrous marriage to a psychopathic drug addict. For the entirely of my marriage, I was simultaneously working on this and other projects, whilst trying to survive a nightmare that perhaps only other partners, siblings, or parents of mentally ill addicts, will understand.

On 13th February 1996, my husband attempted to murder me. I instituted divorce proceedings immediately, but I remained traumatised, and sought psychological help from Dr B, an addiction specialist whom I'd been paying to treat my husband. Dr B wouldn't talk about what had happened and instead prescribed large doses of sedatives to help me sleep, and stimulants to wake me from the sedatives and enable me to work the next day. Dr B also became controlling. Looking at my diary about a year later, for 14 April 1996, the day of the BAFTA ceremony, my entry is terse:

"10am Dr B, increased Temazepam. Don't talk about [my husband]! Went to BAFTA."

Back then, animation was the only positive thing in my life. I had poured all my energy into it, but by April 1997 the drugs Dr B prescribed had caused a catastrophe. As a result of his prescription, I had overworked to the extent that I had developed task-specific dystonia, a movement disorder injury that had made my drawing hand spasm up overnight. The dystonia caused me to lose all fine motor control in my drawing hand, and due to this I couldn't animate for many years afterwards.

One of my aims in writing these posts is to consider the narrative arc of my life, from animation success to depths of despair (due to traumatic marriage, injury, loss of career and psychiatric ill-health), and then my slow, painful climb upwards via my autoethnographic animation PhD. This narrative arc is in some ways perhaps my biggest achievement, and I hope to celebrate its trajectory through these reflections.