Key details
Dr Julie Watkins
Senior Lecturer
Julie started her career as a motion graphic designer and animator at Spitfire Television, which was owned by the founder of Molinare. Over the next 20 years she went on to work as lead creative in motion graphics and visual effects for a number of prestigious post-production facilities in Soho and later in Manhattan. She designed concepts and storyboards and was in charge of technical direction and shoot supervision, leading animation teams, creating motion graphics and visual effects for commercials, broadcast graphics, music videos and films.
She began teaching Advanced Flint/Flame part-time at New York University whilst continuing to work in post-production. In 2006 she joined the University of Greenwich and set up and ran a film and television degree in partnership with the BBC. She has designed and delivered moving image courses for practice-led students of film, television, animation and digital-media. Her focus is on the ever-evolving relationship between new forms of moving image, new approaches and technologies and the creative industries.
Julie's qualifications include: PhD Composing Visual Music from an Animator’s Perspective, FHEA Higher Education, MA in Graphic Design (Distinction), and BA(Hons) 3D Design.
Responsibilities within the university
Senior Lecturer in Animation and Film & TV
Awards
2000 AICP Winner for Advertising Excellence
Recognition
FHEA - fellow of the higher education academy |
Research / Scholarly interests
Julie's practice-based research explores animation. She expands on the concept of animation to include embodied visceral affect and a broader visual arts context underpinning the development of animation as installation. This work contributes to a less explored area of research, focusing on animating in the twenty-first century, re-framing modernist traditions in light of post-modern understandings of subjectivity and affect, leading to new understandings in how animation are perceived, created and displayed and could be allied to health. In her earlier research aspiration for a universal language of visual music, via audiovisual synthesis, was evaluated against the premise of expressivity and phenomenological experience. This culminated in a reframing of visual music, freeing it from musical structures, and offering a phenomenological approach to composition that could be particularly apposite for artists, animators and performers.
Julie has particular expertise in creating commercial motion graphics, experimental films and immersive installations featuring abstract animation. Her work has been widely disseminated in journal articles, conference papers, installations and films. She has added knowledge to creative communities via international journals of contemporary artistic practice and research and in international communities concerned with film, animation, art, music, dance, theatre, immersive environments and the sciences. This research has the potential to benefit scholars, researchers, creative and health practitioners investigating sound and image relationships, animation, affective virtual reality and immersive experiences.
Solo Exhibition
Emotion In Abstract Animation: Designing A New Form Of Visual Music (2019) [Exhibition]
Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, London April 2019.
Joint Exhibition
Watkins, J. and Oyebanjo F. Tactile Vision & Voice (2022) [Installation]
Bathway, University of Greenwich, London September 2022