Adult Day Return
Year of release: 1986
Original format: 16mm
Running time: 2 minutes
Screening formats: U-Matic video, QuickTime, Blu-ray or DVD
Credits: A film by Kayla Parker
Production: Chapter Film Workshop
Distribution and sales: Sundog Media sundogmedia@gmail.com

Description
This is my first ‘animated film’, made during a 16mm animation course run by Chapter Film Workshop over 4 or 5 weekends in the winter of 1986. The animated line drawing sequences in red Chinagraph pencil are my first ‘proper’ animation drawings, memories of my body moving through the South Wales landscape. Included in the film are small coloured drawings from my notebooks, which I drew during my bus journeys between Newport and Cardiff, and there are a few flickering train journeys too. The visuals were filmed on a makeshift animation rostrum at Chapter, and processed by the lab at S4C. All the sounds except for the crow were recorded by me on two bus journeys, from Cardiff to Newport, and back again, using Chapter Film Workshop’s reel-to-reel tape recorder with my mic. The crow’s caw I recorded from an LP record of birds’ song. I composed the film at Chapter on a Steenbeck, my first 16mm film edit.

Production notes
I finished my fine art degree at Gwent College of Higher Education in June 1985, and graduated that autumn. A group of us stayed around in Newport after we’d left art college, and I continued to live in the basement flat in Clytha Square till June 1986. It was too expensive to buy a video camera in those days, and I couldn’t get access to any of the equipment at the college, so there was no way to continue to develop my video art practice by making stuff. I signed on, paid my rent with housing benefit, read and wrote and drew, went for walks, and did research for a children’s book project. In the summer of 1985 I went swimming almost every day with Pam and Jane, my best friends from college, in Newport’s super-heated indoor pool, and dived the deep end for treasure, lost silver and gold earrings. In early September I spent a week in Scotland in Kinnloch Rannoch: I watched Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance lying in bed drinking a can of ice-cold Special Brew, went mushroom hunting, and saw the Highland Games in Pitlochry. In the autumn I joined the South Wales Women’s Film Group, which was based in Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff; and then gradually things started to shift for me again.

Publication and comments
2011 Exeter Phoenix Digital on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/21799249 A friend came across my film online... someone at Exeter Phoenix must have found an ancient VHS copy of Adult Day Return I’d given to Exeter Film and Video Workshop when I moved from Wales in 1986.

Exhibition
1986
Chapter Arts Centre cinema, Cardiff, Wales, UK (premiere, April 1986)