Feeling kinky

I’ve been sculpting all week, and gaining hardcore respect for those fine folk down the road at Mackinnon & Saunders. How those guys meet tight deadlines without crimping themselves into chiropractic emergency cases, I’ll never know. It feels like a small but weighty child has been sitting on my head and shoulders – which, ironically, is a common occurrence during my non-modelling downtime. Only green tea and stretching exercises can keep me vaguely human-shaped over the coming plasticene-heavy weeks.

I’d like to blog further about this project, but we’re still in the traditional hush-hush launch phase. I’m sure you understand. Thankfully, it’s NOT plasticene animation.

Chugger Fool

In 2007, I got a call from the traintastic world of Chuggington, and agreed to be parachuted in on a troubleshooting mission. The director was concerned that the human characters in the show were proving tricky to animate. I wasn’t surprised. Correctly-proportioned, naturalistic humans are always a nightmare. Realistic actions look slow and stiff while cartoony ones look plain wrong. This being telly, the animators had no time develop ideas by shooting their own live-action reference, as they would on a feature.

I saw no other option: I had to shoot all the reference myself – alone, with my tiny digital camera, in the back room of my house. I’m no actor but I know about expressing character through body movement. To look both realistic and animated, I had to make natural human movements with cartoon-level energy. And keep it up for 52 episodes.

Was it worth it? I made an almighty fool of myself and got a hernia (no joke)! Did it work? I have my doubts. Maybe the mission was an impossible one. But it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Zzzzzap !!

A quick test of an effect I’m developing.

It’s one of my missions in life to free stop motion from its image of charming rubber puppets in miniature sets. Been there, done that. This is pretty charmless and scares small children, so mission accomplished.

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

Cosgrove Hall studios demolished

Good news for Manchester animators – Cosgrove Hall is reborn as Cosgrove Hall Fitzpatrick (CHJ) Entertainment, with a 2D series creating "at least 75 jobs".

New boy Francis Fitzpatrick mentions the possibility of a return to stop motion – but clearly not in the same location, as demolition begins on their erstwhile studios in Chorlton.

Bradford Animation Festival

I made a flying visit to the Bradford Animation festival as a guest of the Ideas Foundation, to attend a special screening of the St Ambrose Barlow film at their awards ceremony. It was a great way to see the highlights of the festival in one evening, and all for free – an important consideration for a notorious tightwad like myself.

I should really have attended the whole festival, since there were some very interesting people who I would have liked to meet. Maybe next year.