Researching Animation/Art Forums and Networks

Now that I have an art account on Instagram, I've been researching areas beyond this, where I can potentially display my work/ interact with other artists.

Reddit has been a good social media site for finding art forums. I have followed the Stopmotion, the Animation, the Original Content Poetry and the Collage forums. These are good places for displaying work because there is a lot of interaction on these sites (comments on posts/likes) as well as a steady (but not overwhelming) stream of new posts from creators, so my work wouldn't get lost amongst other creators were I to post it up, which is often an issue. The only problem with this site is there are often a lot of rules on what you can and can't post.

Instagram has been a good social media site for following hashtags. I have followed #cutuppoetry, #stopmotion and #collageart. The #stopmotion hashtag was very useful for finding work that I liked, and subsequently getting in touch with animators via email to ask about their work processes. The hashtags are a good way to get found as they are easy to search up, they are open for anyone on instagram to discover and you can use 30 of them per post.

I searched to see if there were any groups on Facebook that were of interest. There was one called 'Stop Motion Movie Making for Everyone', however the problem with this is that it is a private group and so, were I to post my work on it, it wouldn't reach many people, and the group gets over 100 posts a week, so my work would likely get lost amongst other peoples work. It was the same issue with the poetry forums, except they were getting hundreds of posts per day. 

What Went Well

• This process has been good for displaying my work as well as discovering the work of other people doing similar things
• Instagram is my favourite place for displaying work as it is the most visual social media site and easy to come across people's work with the hashtags
• Responses have been very positive from people who have seen my work

Criticism

• A lot of the time, posts about my work would just get lost amongst everyone else's work and not receive a lot of attention
• I didn't find much luck on Facebook in terms of finding groups that weren't overwhelmed with the amount of posts they were getting