Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Neeley.
Hi Mark, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I am originally from the small, rural town of Harrison on the far west side. After a short stint in Westwood, my wife and I have lived in Price Hill for the past eight years. For the past seven months, with my new baby as well. I am an animator and designer; I make films using hand-drawn and painted animation. The process and tools are all analogue. I animate music videos and also make personal short films and do promotional/advertising work for things like creative brands. I am also a journalist and a contributing writer for the long-running music publication Aquarium Drunkard, and sometimes my written work appears in other publications like Volume 1 Brooklyn or Shindig! magazine.
While animation and illustration are my calling card, I’m very passionate about all of it. It’s a bit hard to summarize exactly what I do because it is very multi-nuanced. I feel fortunate to get to work within multiple realms that I have always been passionate about: animation, music, film, counterculture history, and more. My daily routine could include collaborating with a musician on a music video, creating designs for a clothing company, or helping curate and facilitate a film screening or recording session. I suppose I am a bit of a creative conduit for all of these types of things.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Not at all. Traditional paper animation is an extremely labor-intensive artform. Each project required a lot of time and patience, and the long nights and weekends can be a strain on family and social life. Compensation for independent animation is a constant struggle. As much as animation has advanced from a technical and accessibility perspective, in a lot of ways it is still bogged down with the same stereotypes that it had in the “golden era” of the forties and fifties. People still struggle to grasp how animation is actually made and if it should be intellectualized as an art form. There are still very limited funding opportunities for projects like short films. In terms of projects like music videos, it can be a similar struggle in regards to the budgets that record labels are willing to pay for animation, etc.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
As an animator and illustrator, I work on a variety of different creative projects. I am most well-known for the music videos that I have animated: among my favorites have been ones for musicians Maston, Spencer Cullum, Cactus Lee, and most recently the Japanese band Never Young Beach. My personal short film “Fragments” recently had a long run on the international film festival circuit, culminating by winning the PBS “Reel 13” program, which was a real honor. I also animate for the Aquarium Drunkard Picture Show, which is the visual program of the taste-making music publication. “Fragments” is the project that I am most proud of; it is a very personal story that I was somewhat reluctant about releasing. I am proud of the way it came out, the film’s soundtrack by my friend Yohei, and how people seemed to relate to the story.
On the illustration/design side, I have been fortunate to be involved in a lot of great projects. I have gotten to do work for publications like The Believer, clothing companies like Jungmaven and Worn Free, and great record labels like Daptone.
And as a journalist, in a way, I think of it as an extension of the visual art side. It is a way for me to express the things that I already obsess over. I am the type of person who gets sucked into something (whether that be a record, film, or individual) and have to just dig deeper and deeper into research. I don’t know that that is always healthy, but it’s how my brain operates. I have been fortunate to have outlets like Aquarium Drunkard, where the readership is so vast, and it is such a respected outlet.
I believe that what most people would say sets my work apart is the “retro” nature of it. By definition that’s true because everything I do is hand drawn, inked, and painted. Due to so much modern artwork now being churned out digitally and vectorized, that is indeed retro. I have no qualms about saying that I prefer the era of illustration and animation, where the ink lines themselves were a unique visual medium, and you can practically see the fingerprints of the artist on their work. The other side of this is that I am still working the only way I know how. I do not actually use programs like Photoshop at all.
What were you like growing up?
I was fairly introverted growing up, probably like a lot of artists. I have been drawing since I was a toddler, truly as long as I can remember. Before I taught myself how to animate, it was making the really primitive thing kids make like flipbooks and comic strips. As a teenager, I became obsessed with music. The emergent alternative/indie rock scene was very exciting, and I was also collecting sixties records from a young age. This was, fortunately, when you could still buy used records for very cheap.
As far as the internet goes, I was a part of that last generation to be pre-internet growing up. With that being said, we did get a home computer with dial-up internet pretty early on … probably late nineties. Of course, that was incredibly exciting. In those days, it was just an education tool. I specifically remember that some of my earliest internet searches were learning more about the way animation was actually made (since I had only had a couple library books to go off of). I think, with the current wave of nostalgia and pop culture renaissance that the nineties era is having, it’s sort of a strange feeling for people in my age range. It has sort of forced me to look back and realize that I was a part of that last generation where young people grew up discovering music on the radio, relying on physical media to seek things out, etc.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.markneeley.com
- Instagram: markaneeley
- Other: https://vimeo.com/user72702573
