A Brief History So Far
LABOUR OF LOVE
The Masterpiece of Tamagata has been a labour of love for almost seven years. Producer and Co-Director Leo Crane shares how it all began with an animation workshop…
In 2019, I was running an introductory workshop for charcoal animation. I’d prepared simple exercises like clouds floating across the sky, the sea rolling, or a flame flickering; but one participant had other ideas. She was determined to animate a magic paintbrush painting a baby, something suspiciously specific.
At the end, as we were packing up, she came clean. For decades, she'd been sitting on a story, the only unpublished tale by her mother Betty Misheiker, a much-loved children’s author. It had to be animated - could I help? That’s how I met Ilona Suschitzky and joined forces to make The Masterpiece of Tamagata.
My husband, Roy Joseph Butler, is a screenwriter, so together with Ilona, we developed a synopsis, proof of concept and secured funding from Arts Council England. We produced a short animated sequence with our composer Anna Rice, secured a stunning space right next to the Royal Academy in London and built a theatrical set as a glimpse into Tamagata’s world. We opened the doors to hundreds of visitors, including Celia Atkin, who became our executive producer, and Masami Yamada, Japanese curator at the V&A, who became our adviser.
This was June 2021. Buoyed by that success, we extended the film, ran a casting call for actors, commissioned a full orchestral score, and hired a team of digital animators led by the multi-award-winning Natasza Cetner. We also engaged Koshu, a master painter from Japan, to teach us suiboku-ga (ink wash painting).
The mix of traditional painting and new tech caught the attention of the burgeoning digital art scene. We were invited to show in galleries from California to Korea, with massive projections across Paris. We raised funds through NFT sales and kept going: thousands of paintings, painstaking digital work, and experiments with generative AI.
By 2024, we'd finished about half the film and had run out of money. But Ilona and I kept going. In 2025, Responsible AI UK and a consortium of universities offered further funding to use Tamagata as a case study because of our dedication to traditional craft, expanded with careful and controlled use of AI.
With that new momentum, we have partnered with Sedition and Aria to release a new series of artworks. Available to collect as digital editions, these works invite more people into the Tamagata ‘family’ and will raise much-needed funding as we work towards to film’s completion.
