A tribute to Mark Hall

I was privileged to work for Cosgrove Hall Films from 1992-98, and found it a wonderfully creative place – a true ideas factory. While lesser studios came and went, Cosgrove Hall Films seemed immortal, due to the sheer quality of the storytelling it produced and the talent of the people producing it.

The leap from the work-at-home ethos of TV animation pioneers such as Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin to the organisational enterprise of an animation studio with the resources to train up gormless youths straight out of art college, such as myself, is startling even in retrospect. Building puppets and sets, shooting stop motion and drawn animation all under one roof, Cosgrove Hall Films was a miniature miracle.

Studio alumni went on to found their own companies, to win awards and to animate feature films. Many of them have already said it better, but I’m adding my voice to the general background chorus: thank you Brian, and thank you Mark.

Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall

The Canimation industry

Recently, I’ve been getting a fair few messages headed “Rate my Canimation”. It seems a fun competition – Red Bull's “nationwide hunt for creative talent open to anyone who’s passionate about animation, regardless of experience”. I might have entered it myself if my current identity was slightly more animator and slightly less three-year-old’s-daddy.

But how healthy is stuff like this? I don’t mean the high-caffeine beverage. I’m sure that does you a power of good. I’m talking about the health of our creative industries.

Crowdsourcing has become a bit of a dirty word. Mass Animation, a project founded by Sony Pictures to enlist 58,000 animators to work on a theatrically released CG film, mostly for zero remuneration – provoked Mass Scorn when it launched in 2008. But when branded as a chance to “give your creativity wings” such initiatives can seem like genuine opportunities for talent to reach the top of the slush pile.

And maybe they are. It's just that it feels a tad exploitation-ish. Like the government sending the young unemployed to work in supermarkets for up to two months, with no pay or guarantee of a job.

“It seems we’re being used as some free labour, especially in the runup to Christmas,” Cait Reilly, 22, told The Guardian, stacking shelves in a Birmingham Poundland on pain of losing her Job Seeker’s Allowance.

If we live in a society where such schemes are lauded by the employment minister as “a big success”, then it’s no wonder we’re happy to advertise energy drinks for nothing.

Red Bull sold 4,204 billion cans last year. You’d think they’d stretch to a richer reward for their newest marketing brains than a laptop or a month-long internship. But then, their empire was built on such low-cost tactics as employing students to host parties where their product was sold. And that certainly worked out for them. I mean, who drinks Lucozade nowadays? That’s right. Your gran.

Dancing dead mice - a Canimation that caught my eye