Animation and Film Art Portfolio
What Animation & Film Mean to Me
Some things don't sit still long enough for a single image to hold them. Pain moves. Grief moves. The version of yourself that existed before something happened isn't the same one that exists after. Animation and film are the only media I’ve found that can actually show the in-between, not just the before and after. It's slower to make than almost anything else I do, and less forgiving. But some ideas only make sense in motion.
Pain (2023)
Pain, created by me in digital animation with sharp, deliberate spikes of light in the exact blue and white tones that cause me physical pain. This piece captures the sensory reality of light sensitivity, inspired by my own experience of being Autistic.
'Pain' (2023) by Kaye Outhwaite, Digital Animation MP4. © 2023 Kaye Outhwaite. All Rights Reserved.
This one came out of the zine, How It Feels To Be Autistic, the same project where I tried to map out what my five senses actually do to me, not how they're supposed to work. Light is the worst of it. Blue and white tones specifically. It's not "sensitive," it's not "a bit much", it's instant, debilitating pain. My head splits, I can't think, sometimes I'm sick.
So I used the exact colours that do that to me and built the animation out of them anyway, causing myself significant pain during the whole process. The sharp spikes of light aren't decoration; they're the closest visual translation I could get to what actually happens in my head when a room is lit in the wrong colours. If it's uncomfortable for you to watch, good. That's accurate.
Watering Down (2022)
Watering Down, created by me from a photograph manipulated with a blurred, running distortion effect. This piece captures a family beach memory dissolving out of reach, inspired by grief and water as a mythological threshold between life and death.
'Watering Down' (2022) by Kaye Outhwaite, Manipulated Photography MP4. © 2022 Kaye Outhwaite. All Rights Reserved.
This is a manipulated photograph from the last time I was at the beach with my family, before I lost them. I let the image blur and run, like the screen itself was watering down, because that's what happened to the happiness of that moment. It didn't stay sharp. It slipped.
The blur is grief too. Tears doing what tears do, distorting everything you're trying to look at clearly. And I kept coming back to water as a symbol of death across so many different traditions, not just my own. In Greek mythology, the River Styx marks the boundary souls cross between the living world and the dead. The river is a passage, not just an ending. Other traditions echo that same idea: in Celtic belief, springs and wells were treated as thresholds into the Otherworld, and many flood myths across cultures use water as the force that ends one world and makes way for another.
Losing my family felt like its own kind of death. Not literal, but total, a threshold I crossed and didn't come back from. So the water in this piece isn't just an effect. It's doing the same work water has always done: marking the place where one thing ends and something else, unrecognisable, begins.