The Looking Game: Employing the labyrinth as a formal and practical framework in producing a faux-interactive animated short film

In this essay, I map a maze of practice, detailing the research and production of the short animated film The Looking Game , completed during my MA at the Royal College of Art in 2023. The Looking Game is a complex film with faux-operational, faux-interactive and structuralist elements. Executed in paper cut-outs, it depicts a fictitious gameplay environment inspired by eye-tracking. The narrator’s instructions command a set of large red roving dots, which represent the visual attentions of a fabricated audience. The dots obey instruction where possible, until the game becomes unplayable. The narrator breaks from her function, making mistakes and attempting to connect. A simulation of a simulation, the film demonstrates animation as a means of imitation and a dialogic audience-film relation. The labyrinth is applied as a metaphor in the structuring of the film, and in revealing the architecture of my experimental animation practice.