Jabari Brown
Jabari.kibwebrown@gmail.com
I’m a Jamaican/Guyanese animator who grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. I discovered stop-motion playing with a webcam in my parents’ office when I was 10 years old and caught a fascination with animation that I've yet to put down.
Today I mostly do character and effects animation (anything that lets me animate traditionally) and all of my illustrations are drawn on Photoshop. My animations are split between being made in Photoshop, After Effects, ToonBoom, and Blender. Apart from traditional animation I’m really interested in motion graphics, particularly kinetic typography. There’s something about animating speech and imbuing words with personality and finding motion to fit the context of what’s being said, etc, that's really enjoyable in a very West Indian way.
Career-wise I’m caught somewhere between wanting to use animation to highlight and elevate voices and cultures, particularly those back home in the Caribbean, and wanting to make some trippy-looking animation for TV shows- ideally both!
I want the art I create to provide representation that I didn’t see growing up. Having an identity influenced by 3 Caribbean countries has exposed me to lots of culture: colors and shapes and aesthetics that are rich in imagery and context. I would like to design worlds that people like myself can easily imagine themselves in - put them in narratives they’ve heard all their lives from a rich culture of orature and storytelling and augment it visually. That aside I’d also love to share Caribbean culture with the world. The Caribbean is home to lots of people and cultures- an excellent case of plurality. Lots of these cultures have very strong ties to an oral tradition and storytelling is everyone's birthright in a very cultural way. Everyone does it and in their own unique ways at that.
More than just technical skill, animation is the art of storytelling and it is my dream to contribute to the animation industry in the region so that we can turn all that storytelling potential energy into a differently tangible cultural capital we can utilize to boost our voices and share our uniqueness with the world. The wider world has been interacting with the Caribbean for hundreds of years and historical and geographical context creates a microcosmic cultural ecosystem that is unique in its multitudes and ripe with storytelling potential. I’d like to develop my skills as a storyteller to become an appropriate tool with which to extract from the goldmine of storytelling opportunities that exist back home.
I'm currently working on getting my MFA at SCAD Atlanta. There are lots of things I'd like to do with this education I'm receiving but the most important thing I'd like to do with it is open a studio back in Trinidad and Tobago where I grew up.