the fi rst results – go on, please be honest?
JD – I didn’t have the patience to do exercises – just plunged in and did what was necessary. But I made a lot of ‘tests’. These were usually one-scene experiments with some idea that intrigued me.
TB – I plunged into it, although I did think about what I wanted the character to do. I dressed a GI Joe doll to resemble a desert sheikh, holding two swords, standing inside a tent. He lifted his head and began to dance with the swords. That animation turned out to be some of the smoothest stop motion I’ve done, probably because I poured a lot of TLC into it, taking my time, and thinking about the movements. I did this around when The Golden Voyage of Sinbad came out, so I assume that the sheikh was inspired from Ray’s Kali sequence.
KD – Nope, went straight in for the Oscar nomination. I made a fi lm about a dog who tried to commit suicide from being bored. It was a great little fi lm, shot in twos, but I was proud of it. I nearly went for the person who deleted it. Plonker!
RC – I plunged in. I did little scenes fi rst, to learn what I could do. I fi lmed in my basement. The old lights only had a four-hour life so my mom would yell down every hour and I’d open the lens a half-stop. I knew nothing about practical things, such as a simple lamp extension cord not being able to handle a set of four lights and my little rear projector. I blew all the fuses one night. God was watching over me that night. It was exciting to see the footage get better over time.
DC – I set my fi gure the task of building a telephone in three different architectural styles. The phone was my scale so the architect must have been from a different and tiny world. I plunged straight in with only the knowledge that ‘you move it a little bit then take a frame!’ and discovered all the limitations of my puppet, my set, my super eight camera, using daylight, etc. The fi nished piece was a mad three-minute dash in various daylight phases. He moved like the old black-and-white fi lms, but you could tell what was happening and everyone was impressed by the magic I’d created. My toy had come to life and built a sort of telephone thing!
AW – After watching other animators I took an old Semafor puppet and I made a one-minute thirty-second shot. The director said (in Polish) ‘Oh bugger, you’re quite good’ and accepted me onto his team.
SB – I tried to make a fi lm with Phil Gray. It was frustrating. It didn’t go well.
KP – My fi rst animation on fi lm was a 16 mm fi lm-making exercise at university in 1995. I directed a fi lm called Visit to the Art Museum, which was live-action with cut-out sequences of paintings coming to life, infl uenced by Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animation. I had a natural sense of timing from the get-go, but all the animation was a bit overexposed. My fi rst clay animation was just simple tabletop clay snakes interacting to form letters for a title sequence. I was much more pleased with the results and was inspired to keep going with it.
TD – I plunged straight in, working intuitively, drawing on my early years of posing clay. It was a rather crude clay dragon waking up and eating a ball that rolls into frame. It turned out all right. I got enough positive satisfaction from the results to have another go. It’s important to have positive experiences in the beginning. That keeps it fun, which sharpens focus and encourages taking on further challenge and complexity. I’d overloaded myself in the early stages of other creative endeavours before trying animation, and had a string of half-fi nished projects trailing behind me, which bothered me. I may have instinctively not wished to add another undone effort to that string. I was carrying a heavy course load at the time which sort of saved me from myself. I didn’t allow myself to get overly embroiled in detail, which I probably would’ve done if I felt I’d more time.
We had to wait several days for the rushes. On seeing them, the timing was fi ne, but I had done something stupid, and had kept doing it. There was Grandma happily putting her toes down fi rst, giving her an odd walk indeed. I took myself away into a corner and felt how I walked, feeling exactly what the feet are doing and why they are doing it. A hugely important lesson to learn at the beginning: in a casual walk, the heel always goes down fi rst. Of course there are comedy moments and tip-toeing that need the toes to come down fi rst, but it does look odd otherwise. I have never been one for looking in a mirror or videoing myself, preferring to act it internally, literally feeling the weight and positioning of the limbs. But I had animated a puppet, almost got away with it, and it was a glorious experience. I had given some
semblance of life to a character, and she was acting. I was on a high, and the world, for me at least, changed.
RH – My fi rst proper animation was on my foundation course, which was a drawn piece of someone painting a wall. It was actually pleasing. Studying the basic exercises followed this.
JC – At college. I tried to animate oil paints on glass unsuccessfully. The fi rst problem being I was not good with oils, add to that my ambitious idea to trace the journey of a goldfi sh, fl ushed down the toilet, through the sewers and fi nally into the ocean. I attempted a drawn animation based on the painting The Raft of the Medusa. It involved one of the occupants sucking up the others like spaghetti. This too was a disappointment. Both projects were too ambitious for my level of skill.
FL – I’m actually in the starting now. But yes, I am doing all the basic exercises: walk exercises, weight, and ease-in–ease-out, etcetera. I’m trying to learn animation principles before making a full fi lm. I’ve started many things in life thinking that I should make a masterpiece without even knowing the basic things. I’ve learnt it doesn’t work that way. So I’m sure that I’m learning to learn.
DS – Pete was the main animator and I don’t think we ever did things like walk cycles before we started. We didn’t have any formal training and apart from reading a few books which were rather technical, there was nothing which said we should start doing fi ve-fi nger exercises before we played Beethoven, so to speak.