Growing up I was interested in cartoons, sci fi and fantasy. My favourites were cartoons like Transformers, Thundercats and pretty much any other violent action cartoon. Even now I remember seeing both Transformers on Wackaday and Thundercats which Im sure debuted on a Sunday night which is a bit weird. As a child I wanted to be either a barbarian or Optimus Prime briefly after watching Top Gun I wanted to be a Jet. Both the title sequences for these series were so cool, exciting, iconic music and slick animation. Having watched the shows more recently these are the only parts that are any good. If you still think either of these cartoons are very good your mistaken.
As with all cartoons they had all sorts of tie-ins films, toys, cloths, comics etc. I sporadically bought comics of all sorts of stuff Spiderman, Transformers, Zoids (which I recently re-read and its a great read) Thundercats etc I settled on collecting Thundercats Comics which I have most of a run of the first 100. The Zoids comics features excellent art and even early work by the awesome Grant Morrison
 |
| check this out its really good apart from the abrupt end |
I settled on Comics as my passion and my goal became to be a comic book artist. In the UK during the 80s Marvel UK produced loads of original comics so I could see a direct route to the career. For me Cartoons and Animation was unachievable. I felt quite detached from the production method as it was behind a screen and out of reach, I had no means to reproduce what I saw on TV. Comics I could hold read, draw and create myself.
My big problem with toys was that you never had all the figures, I used to cut out the characters I hadn't got and stick them to card with bases to expand my ranks of Transformers. 2D cardboard Transformers were quite limiting as they were flat and didn't Transform. When I decided that didn't work I began making Transformers out of Plasticine. This worked far better to the point that I just played with Plasticine Transformers instead of the toys. As well as having a complete collection of Transformers I had all the Marvel Heroes and all the Turtles (and blue peter inspired sewerbase) all made from plasticine.
At school I took Art as an option. Then progressed to College continuing with Art though expanding to study Graphics, Jewellery, Printmaking, Ceramics and Media. I never really enjoyed Media as we had to use Macs which I couldn't get my head round plus I just didn't like using computers. For one of the projects we had to book out a digital camera and take photos of letters. I had left it so late that the cameras were all booked out. As I still had to do the work I bought a cheap digital camera with some Argos vouchers I had won from my job at Mcdoanlds. The Camera did the job and it had an animation feature. Rather than exporting the images as individual photos its was possible to export them as a short quicktime. Then you could add effects in paint. This was my first attempt at Animation. Unfortunately I no longer have any of my early attempts at animation though they were probably amazing works of art. The project I bought the camera for also turned out to be my first film project.
The project was a creative presentation of collected and made images of the alphabet. Rather than just handing in a pile of images I filmed all the images. I held a toy rocket on a string and made it fly past the alphabet for a simple narrative (it was very crude). At this stage it still hadn't occurred to me I could be studying film or animation. I imagine based on my work up to now it was probably looked best for me to avoid this route.
While looking for Universities I was planning to continue with Art and do a fine Art course. It wasn't until looking at a prospectus on the journey home from Wolverhampton I even realised you could study animation at University. I changed courses at the last minuet and did Visual Communication at UCE (now BCU). On this course I studied both live action and animation. I had a go at drawn which i found to be soooo painfully boring that I only produced a handful of drawn animations. I think I still have them on a mini DV somewhere, if I ever find them I may put them online for people to laugh at.
I switched to stopmotion as this is the best one and most fun to do. People often say you have to be patient and it takes ages but I find it pretty instantly rewarding. Within a couple of frames you can have a puppet come to life thanks to your work, I find it very quickly gratifying. Then the more you add the cooler it becomes. This is why I dont enjoy creating drawn animation, you have to sit and draw the same thing over and over and its not until you scan or film it that you can properly appreciate what you have done. I have a lot of respect and time for drawn animators and their great work. The other cool thing about stopmotion is your basically playing with toys and plasticine. Its not quite as fast as just playing but you no longer have to imagine your toys coming to life you are actually bringing them to life.
Okay thats the end for now. I'd like to spend more time in the future writing about specific animations and films that I either think are great and worth checking out or things that have really been an influence on me. I think this covers how I got into animation though.
No comments:
Post a Comment