Published between 1982 and 1995
John Guthrie started work painting cinema foyer displays and now designs labels for Scotch whisky bottles. Both jobs have set him in good stead when it comes to his hobby of cartoon animation. My interest in making animated films was first aroused when I went to see “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as a … Read more
Morris Lakin reports on the progress of his first cartoon film and he makes an interesting discovery about walk cycles. I had got as far as scene two in my first cel production. In scene one the boy and girl characters had been established meeting and walking along the road. I wanted give the impression … Read more
Marked on the tunnel is the start of the motion – there seemed to be little point in doing the drawings before this because they would be too small to be seen and too tiny to draw! From the start point I will paint the tiny figures light grey since strong colour (or black) is … Read more
Maggy Clark tells Animator what paint and trace is all about. It is based on a taped interview conducted by David Jefferson. I started at Halas and Batchelor, like a little factory girl sitting there painting the white bits on the cels and somebody else did the red bits or whatever, and moved into tracing … Read more
Ken Clark went along to Art Babbitt’s seminar on animation held in London and organized by the Richard Williams Studio. Dateline Tuesday August 28th 1984. I arrived outside the Richard Williams Studios as Art Babbitt was leaving for the preview studio where he was holding his third seminar on the art of animation. At first … Read more
“Everybody writes books about the history of animation, and the technicalities of the rostrum camera, but few tell you how to animate. Some call it Art – that’s wishful thinking. It is little more than finger-painting. Although we are going one step further than finger-painting, animation at present is still at the stage where we … Read more
Introduction The Richard Williams Animation studio in London has now won a grand total of 212 International Awards, mostly for their TV commercials, but Williams wants his 40 artists and technicians to take their craft much further. To that end, one of the all-time master craftsmen of animation, Art Babbitt, began a one month animation … Read more
The pressures of “time” and “economics” have so bastardized the medium, we have even forgotten how to stumble. The generation of fine animators spawned at Disney’s in the 1930 -1940 period is fast vanishing. Hopefully some of you, some day, will not only restore the craft to its status of forty years ago – but … Read more
The Course Objectives The secondary purpose of this course is to endow its members with some proven animation formulas that will help them earn a better living, sooner. The clichés we arrived at after years of experimentation will be the subject of our earliest lessons – to give you a head start, we will strip … Read more
The use of live action as a source of information for animators brings me to Eadweard Muybridge. He set up a series of matching cameras, in a row. These cameras were tripped successively by a galloping horse hitting the wires which activated the camera mechanisms. The original purpose of the experiment was to prove Muybridge’s … Read more