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Cambridge Animation Festival 1983

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Perhaps the first major animator to use animation to express his strong revulsion against war was Nonnan McLaren. The Festival will screen both HELL UNLIMITED, made in 1936 after his experiences as a cameraman during the Spanish Civil War and NEIGHBOURS, made at the beginning of the Korean War in 1955.

Cambridge Animation Festival 1983

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Following Britain Salutes New York, the Festival offers America Salutes Cambridge: six programmes of contemporary films made by independent American animators, most of which have never been seen in Britain.

Cambridge Animation Festival 1983

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This year for the first time there will be a children’s workshop immediately preceding the Festival and the film made at this week-long work¬shop will be screened during the Festival. The workshop will be for fifty local Cambridge children and the directors running this exciting event will include Norwegian director, Inni Karine Melbye, Gro Strom, Kevan Wooldridge, head of animation at the Royal College of Art in Britain and Jessica Langford who runs many excellent workshops in Scotland.

Bugs Bunny Signs Up

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Warner Bros were committed to attack the German Nazi party before any other Hollywood studio. After their representative in Berlin had been kicked to death by storm troopers they had broken off all dealings with Germany, and, as supporters of Franklin Roosevelt since 1932, they backed him against the isolationists.

Contemporary British Animation in 1983

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Bugs, of course, was not alone. The feeling in America at this time was viciously anti-Japanese and permeated every medium. An extraordinary article in Time magazine in December 1941 entitled ‘How to tell your friends from the Japs’ gives a few rules at thumb to differentiate the Chinese – friends – from the Japanese.

Editor’s Comment

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Since the last issue of Animator’s Newsletter I have had stands at two exhibitions on behalf of Filmcraft and also the Animator’s Association. One was LAFF with SoCo in the New Forest and the other was WIDEX-AV in London. It has been a great pleasure to meet the readers who attended these events and all … Read more

Reader’s Letters

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THE AMAZING CINEMAN Dear David, Thanks very much for the copy – my first – of the Animator’s newsletter, which I found very informative and entertaining. It’s good to know there are many more people starting off at my non-existent level of experience. I’ve always drawn pictures, serious drawing and cartoons, but for some reason … Read more

Planning your animation film

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Planning your Film

Ian Whitworth, winner of our animation drawing competition, begins a series on animation.

There are two ways of making a cartoon film. One is to say I am an amateur making an amateur film, so don’t expect too much. The other way is to say I may be an amateur but I will give it every thing I have.

Planning your animation film

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The planning of a film goes through various stages to lets take them one at a time.

The first thing you need is a story, you can write your own, or adapt an existing one. Animation tends to be a solitary thing, don’t lock yourself away and keep everything a secret. Show your story around, discuss it, listen to other peoples ideas, you may be able to use them, or reshape them.

Planning your animation film

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Timing is something which tends to frighten people a bit. There are books you can buy which will explain it in much more detail, but a simple method is to act out the action four or five times, timing each one. Every time will be different, so take the average timing. If a movement takes two and a half seconds, it will require forty five drawings, but if you shoot on two’s, that is two exposures for each drawing, then you can do the same action in twenty three drawings. Not all action can be shot on two’s, some will have to be ones, an example is fast actions, or slow or complex ones. If you are using a sound track, time your music or whatever sound you use and fit your action to the timing. There are two ways to do it. Fit your action to the sound track, or f it a sound track to your action. With experience, your sense of timing will come naturally.

The ANIMA Report

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From Animator’s Association secretary Neil Carstairs. I am pleased to say that ANIMA is going from strength to strength and we now number among our members professional animators and animation teachers as well as the amateur and independent animators. The aim of ANIMA, to promote the exchange of ideas and techniques between animators and to … Read more

The Shadows Move – the 1930s

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The Shadows Move
Part Two

Ken Clark continues the story of British Animation.

When, in 1935, Anson Dyer and Archibald Nettlefold opened Anglia Films Ltd., Dyer filled the art rooms with the best talent he could find, headed by two Danes: Mykleson and Myller. Len Kirley, Laurie Price, Sid Griffiths, Spud Murphy, Lesley Manners, and Charles Stobbart the cameraman were key personnel. Charles was a cousin of the famed screen actor Charles Laughton. It was Jorgan Myller who designed the first in a series of Operatic Burlesques entitled ‘Carmen’. The film had a certain panache, style and pace, and involved full animation much to the dismay of Dyer who was visibly taken aback by the enormous stack of animated drawings.

The Shadows Move – the 1930s

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Alas, although Dyer’s idea had been quite sound, and they believed it to be a ‘sure fire’ hit, they had overlooked one significant point. The characters, the stories and backgrounds were excellent, and even the muted results of the Dunning 2-Colour System were tolerably acceptable, but no one had anticipated the effect that the ponderous beat of the verses would have on the action. Holloway’s lugubrious delivery of the lines of the monologue worked perfectly well on stage and radio; but when the artists came to animate the Sergeant walking ‘on the beat’, they found they needed 48 drawings to complete each steps The pace was pedestrian in both senses of the word, though many cinemagoers preferred it to the frenetic pace of imported productions.

The Shadows Move – the 1930s

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Almost concurrent with the setting up of Anglia Films a Daily Express newspaper strip cartoonist named Roland Davies thought it would be a good idea to produce a cartoon film series featuring his character ‘Steve the Horses. In 1936 he opened a studio, enlisted the aid of fledgling artists from the Ipswich School of Art, and later took on a young Ronnie Giles.

Drawing Cartoon Figures

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Drawing Cartoons
By David Jefferson

Figures can be based on a series of ovals. Draw the ovals lightly in pencil. When the pose looks right you can go over it and add the details. Rub out the unwanted lines as you go.

Reminiscences of an animator

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Reminiscences
By D J M Coleman

I first began to draw ‘animatable’ pictures in the early seventies, after seeing Bob Godfrey’s excellent DO-IT-YOURSELF FILM ANIMATION SHOW. The fact that I did not possess a cine camera did not bother me. I hoped to borrow one of the two I knew existed in my wider family and save up for “a film” myself. I spent a great many hours drawing complete scenes on IZAL medicated toilet-paper a convenient source of standard-sized sheets of tracing paper.

Reminiscences of an animator

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The eight houses in the city square were made of cast-off computer-paper boxes and the “city wall’ was built around a framework of rubbish from the computer tape library with modrock, plaster, and as nasty a paint-job as I could manage. Every single item of scenery could be removed so as to allow the sort of camera angle which could have been achieved by my puppets (mostly less than 15 cm tall) but would otherwise have been impossible for me using a camera (on their scale) about ten feet long with a front element more than a yard across.

Squaring the Circle

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Squaring the Circle

Neil Carstairs tells us about his latest cartoon which won one of Australia’s “Ten Best on Eight” awards.

I finished Nightmare in November 1981, just in time for the U.K. competition season. I was thinking about changing from 2 pin to ACME registration because parts of Nightmare, particularly in the bedroom scene, were unsteady. This feeling was confirmed when one of the judges in the Scottish 8, a professional animator, made the same comment.

Squaring the Circle

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My storyboard now had a title “The Circle & The Square” and three designs with the story connecting them: Square draws flower… Circle draws deer… Deer eats flower… Square gets angry… Square draws big flower… Flower eats deer… Circle draws??? I went back to experimenting with a compass.

Beginner’s View of Inking and Painting Cels

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Beginner’s View
Inking and painting.

Morris Lakin continues his journey of discovery.
Part Two – First go at Painting Cels.

I have just finished painting the cels for the first scene of my first cel animation. Owing to the fact that my spare time has been limited it has taken me about nine months to produce 218 cels, which will fill about 15 seconds of screen time. That is work¬ing on them for about 2½ hours a week most of the time.

Beginner’s View of Inking and Painting Cels

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There was no problem when the figures were walking forward (fig. 3), but when the figures turned to walk across the screen the problems started. (Fig. 4) Obviously I could not just paint up to the line and over it because there would be no demarcation between the front leg and the back leg.

Jazz in Animation – Experimental

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Jazz in Animation – Experimental
By Antoinette Moses.

Even more than mainstream animation, the experimental animators have been influenced by jazz. One can trace its fusion back to Guillaume Apollinaire who wrote in the Paris Journal in 1914: “One can compare coloured rhythm to music… We thus will have beyond static painting, beyond cinematographic representation, an art to which one will quickly accustom oneself and which will render its followers infinitely sensitive to the movement of colours, to their interpenetration, to their fast and slow changes, to their convergence, to their flight etc.”

Jazz in Animation – Experimental

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It is possible to get a lot of spirals and curvilinear designs which I was never able to get by cutting off the masking tape; then spraying bleach into the place where the groove was. I made short samples of that sort of material. As I say, less than half of all that stuff is in my possession at this point. I also made alternate versions of a great number of scenes.

Jazz in Animation – Experimental

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I was manipulating cutouts and working with fluids, very much as they are used in the light shows. I had an oil bath on a level tray with the light below. I put dye into the oil until it was deep red, and then used red-blind film in the camera. With my finger or with a stylus, I could draw on this thin bath of oil; and then would push the oil away and the light would shine through so I could draw linear sequences very freely; and by selecting the weight and thickness of the oil, I could control the rate at which the line would erase itself, so that it was constantly erasing with a constantly fresh surface to draw on.

The Films of Sheila Graber 1974 to 1977

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The Films of Sheila Graber

Sheila Graber began experimenting with a Super 8 camera and trial and error methods of animation purely for fun in 1970. In 1974 she won the Movie Maker magazine Ten Best competition with THE BOY AND THE CAT. In the next four years one, two or even three of her animated films appeared in the top ten of this annual competition. Her films went all over the world and gained over 20 top international awards.

The Films of Sheila Graber 1974 to 1977

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THE BOY AND THE CAT – 1974 10 minutes

The first ‘complete’ film I produced, first: shot on Super 8 and re-taken at a later date on 16 mm. Situated in the streets of the seaport in which I live, the characters are based on my own cat and nephew Nigel; and the plot follows their adventures through the snows of Christmas.

The Films of Sheila Graber 1974 to 1977

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THE BOY AND THE SONG – 1976 4 minutes

Brenda Orwin has composed several sound tracks for me. In this one her fine Soprano singing voice is featured singing four well known songs:- ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’, ‘Over the Sea to Sky’, ‘In the deep Mid-Winter’ and ‘Just a Song at Twilight’. Combined with the characters of my nephew and my own cat, the singing hero keeps on courageously against all adversity aided (and abetted) by his stalwart Cat.