My pal Paul Bush, who has died aged 67 in a street site visitors accident, was an experimental film-maker and movie trainer. His film-making work centered on substitute animation, during which objects are changed between frames, lending a magical instability to the bodily world.
Paul’s first brief movie, Furnishings Poetry, changed items of furnishings and fruit, however later he went on to switch actors, together with his movies Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Pas de Deux de Deux swapping out two pairs of protagonists between every body of movie, whereas protecting the motion steady.
His substitute objects additionally included bugs and, in his movie Journey (2018), actual motorbikes, from an enormous historic assortment in Portugal. His final movie, Orgiastic Hyper-Plastic (2020), used an enormous assortment of plastic objects foraged from seashores and roadsides to make a shocking elegy to humanity’s love affair with the fabric. He additionally created longer-form mixed-media movies, together with The Hearsay of True Issues (1996) and Babeldom (2012).
Paul was born in London, to Geoffrey Bush, a composer of classical music, and Julie (nee McKenna), a physiotherapist. He grew up in Golders Inexperienced, north London, and after attending College Faculty faculty in Hampstead studied effective artwork on the Central Faculty of Artwork and Design after which Goldsmiths, College of London, earlier than educating himself film-making on the London Movie Makers’ Co-op and the Chapter Movie workshop in Cardiff.
Having experimented briefly with animation as a scholar, he returned to the medium within the Nineteen Nineties, with the encouragement and assist of Channel 4’s then commissioning editor for animation, Clare Kitson, and aided by the Arts Council of England’s funding for modern work. This allowed him to start out producing movies that have been laborious of their making course of however compelling and seductive to the viewer. Paul’s enduring pleasure in regards to the mechanisms of film-making and notion translated into playful explorations of the probabilities for frame-by-frame manufacturing.
As his movies didn’t generate a lot in the best way of cash, Paul made a residing by educating everywhere in the world, together with on the Nationwide Movie and Tv Faculty within the UK, the Lucerne Faculty of Artwork and Design in Switzerland, Harvard College and the Worldwide Faculty of Movie and TV in Cuba. Possessed of a razor-sharp wit, he was a sort and beneficiant trainer. His ex-students populate the world of experimental film-making, and his movies and his educating have made a long-lasting influence on the planet of modern visible tradition.
Paul is survived by his accomplice, Lana Nikolič, whom he met in 2018, and two kids, Lewis and Eva, from his marriage to Jane Wilkinson, which led to divorce in 2007.
