POETRY IN MOTION

Cutout, clay, cel, sand and Shockwave. Pixilation, puppetry, pinscreen and polygons. There are almost as many ways to animate as there are frames in a feature film - TEN4 draws inspiration from four very different approaches.

It made a refreshing change from tinsel-clad sprites, magical wonderment and reindeer. Alongside staple fare such as The Snowman, a fresh lynchpin of Channel 4's 2006 Christmas schedule was Suzie Templeton's deliciously dark adaptation of Peter and the Wolf. An unsettling psychological study of a baleful-eyed boy and his lupine alter-ego, it used stop-motion puppetry with a mythical intensity that felt faithful to the yarn's Eastern European roots.

"I thought it would take about a year. It took five," reveals Suzie of her Bafta-winning opus. "Three years to raise the money, two years to write the script, and a year to make it. It turned into a massive production. I went from working on my own in a basement to working in Poland with a team of 100 people, communicating through a translator."

Like so many before her, Suzie started her animation career at Farnham College. It was her second degree, and she was 29 when the course began: "I always felt that being older was in my favour," she reflects. "I had to set higher standards; be braver and naughtier." So she threw herself into her first stop-frame film, Stanley -spending many months crafting sets, models and puppets.

It was all going beautifully until the first day on set. "I thought, 'Shit, what do I do now?' I don't know how to animate.' So I just made it up as I went along, as we all do." Suzie recounts her first, and last, walk cycle: "The character kept getting lower and lower to the ground," she giggles. "So I just cut out all the walk cycles. In fact, I've never done a walk cycle since. I got away with it."

Stanley was more than just a stepping-stone. Once complete, Suzie was so proud of her student project that she sent it out to over 100 festivals, and they didn’t just accept it into the programme - it started winning awards. Surfing on success and optimistic for her future as an animator, she went straight from Farnham into the Royal College of Art and vowed to widen her skills-base.

"Caroline Leaf came and gave a talk, and I thought I'd try some sand animation - but it was just impossible," she says of her self-confessedly "hopeless" first dabble in a new technique. "I thought I'd try something else, but I just wasn't good at anything else. I went back and did another stop-motion film in my second year called Dog. It's really, really dark."

Signaling the birth of a unique style that initially made producers wary of disturbing their audience, but would eventually win her the Peter and the Wolf commission, Dog sprang from a disturbing episode that her ex-boyfriend-s father had had with his pet: "The vet messed it up, and it was awful," recalls Suzie. "This grew out of that."

And the fact that the stop-motion studio at the Royal College was in a dark basement with no radio signal could only add spice to the new style. "Someone lent me a Tom Waites tape: The Black Rider," she adds. "That's the only tape I had. Somehow, I think, The Black Rider is in that film."

WHEN HARRY MET WILLIAM

Animation as an art-form covers a vast spectrum, and if you have the skills to enhance footage with effects and 3D models then there's scope to enter a thriving commercial industry. William Bartlett represents Framestore CFC, one of Soho's foremost post-production houses.

Split into four divisions, the company handles effects for blockbusters such as X-Men, Harry Potter and Superman; feature-length animation, with upcoming mouse-flick The Tales of Despero in production; and long-form effects for TV series, including Walking with Dinosaurs. Finally, there's the commercial division - for which William heads up the 2D effects and compositing departments.

"Directors come to us with an idea of what they want to see at the end, and we discuss what we can shoot, where we should use models, and what could be computer-generated," he explains. "In other words, we tell them how to get the best from their money." Clearly from this angle animation is less a creative hobby than a service industry, with rigid budgets, targets and timeframes.

Part of his job is to think outside the box for maximum effect, such as pouring weed-killer on plants, speeding up the footage and running it backwards to replicate super-fast growth in Guinness' acclaimed devolution ad, noitulovE. Another quick-fix trick in the same ad involved shooting rising dough on a hot-plate, treated to resemble a rock formation - freeing up the 3D animation team to focus on dinosaurs and flying squirrels.

"I wanted to be an animator really, but didn't realise that until rather too late," laments William who, despite an interest in art at school, found himself studying Pure Maths. Experimenting with photography as a creative outlet, he took a Super-8 camera and some blobs of Plasticine and started animating dinosaurs: "I thought I'd become the next Ray Harryhousen." It's tempting to wonder whether Harryhousen, creator of wobbly stop-motion monster-flicks One Million Years BC and Sinbad the Sailor, would be correspondingly impressed by Walking with Dinosaurs.

Maintaining this interest in film and photography, after graduating he got a job as a runner in a motion control studio. Gradually, he began to drift down to the post-production department - fascinated by an enigmatic new editing machine called Harry. "It was this huge computer like a load of fridges," he reminisces. "When I saw what it was doing, that mixture of technical and artistic, I knew that was what I wanted to do."

"I could create things without having to be especially creative myself; help people solve problems," enthuses William - and here his mathematical background was perhaps influential. "My wife did the same job as me but studied Fine Art, and she always moaned about how restrictive it was using these things. I thought it was great."

IMPOSSIBLE FIELD

One of Framestore's most memorable ads is Adidas' Impossible Field, where a handful of international football legends - including Beckham, Ballack and Raul - take on contenders balanced on the lines of a pitch, suspended in mid-air on metal bars.

"We were filming fast action on a number of cameras at once, cutting from one angle to another," explains William. "That's a problem for two reasons - you're suspended in the air, which is complicated, and footballers didn't have much time. There were also lots of problems with insurance, so we couldn't do anything too dangerous."

All of the actions were predetermined in a number of self-contained sequences - Beckham receives ball, flicks it over one contender, who falls off; kicks it into the chest of someone else, who also falls off; then jumps in the air and passes it.

These sequences were roughly animated first to determine the camera angles required. "The editor took these renders and edited a final sequence together, which was hugely helpful for planning the live-action blue-screen shoot. Time spent with real footballers was minimal." Back at Framestore, the overall geography of the match was pieced together - 3D pitch, ball and all.

ESUVEE

Essentially a public safety campaign, Esuvee was funded by the Ford Motor Company in the wake of a successful law suit against them by a woman who'd been seriously injured in an SUV accident. "Their advert said she could drive it like a sports car, she did, and it turned over," is William's summation. Ford's advertising was deemed negligent, and part of their penance was to spend thousands of dollars encouraging safer driving.

The ads depict SUVs as powerful and dangerous creatures - part-car, part-beast - at a rodeo. "The idea was that if you're good enough you can handle the power. It was an odd job," he smiles. "Our clients were lawyers with very specific things to communicate."

The first challenge at Framestore's end was building the creature; a cross between a prehistoric mammoth and a modern day car, with headlight eyes and brake-lights in its ankles. The second was getting a rider to sit convincingly on top. "We did lots of tests with different strides - walking, running, trotting - and sat the person on a horse, a bull and a buffalo. We used a mechanical bull in the end; it was easier to control."

MAN IN THE PLASTIC MASK

Flying the flag for pixilation - stop-motion that manipulates real people instead of clay models - is Darren Walsh, creator of Angry Kid. He graduated from Farnham with an experimental film, using a series of masks to animate facial expressions. "I ended up stuck with that style for fifteen years," he grins. "I took an idea for a pilot to Aardman; a screen-test of this kid who would cry himself dry within a minute and ultimately have nothing to offer. It was a study of nothing."

The plan was to pitch a new character, and for the Bristol-based Claymation powerhouse to share their stop-frame expertise in return. "So they put me on Morph, which is their training ground. You write it, animate it, direct it; everything but the voice. He phones you up a week later asking for inspiration, makes various noises and speeds it up. You learn on your own in a corner."

Part of the deal was to produce more Angry Kid films. "We did three to start with, to set the style and see how it worked as a one-minute series. We got a commission with Channel 4 at first, but that didn't work out, so we ended up with 25 one-minute films. That's quite difficult to get rid of - finding a one-minute slot on telly isn't the easiest thing."

A solution came in the form of 'broadband entertainment network' Atom Films - a precursor of the likes of YouTube and MySpace Video. "That was nine years ago, and I didn't know much about the internet," admits Darren. "They couldn't buy them off us, but they'd show them and try to recoup what it cost to make them - which wasn't much - by selling advertising space. It was probably the best thing we could've done."

Through Atom they hoovered up around 10 million downloads in six months, a record for the site - which led to commissions for another batch, this time for both TV and online. "They're still hanging around, even though we finished them six years ago," he reflects. "Now I subsidise the money from that with the odd commercial, and I direct series animations."

Darren is split between Aardman in Bristol and Passion Pictures in London, where he's worked with mountain-climbing Duracell bunnies and helped blend live action, puppetry, 2D and 3D animation in the celebrated Four Steps ad for Becks. As testament to his versatility, he’s now back in the West Country, directing Shaun the Sheep.

His own technique is pretty hard-going on their human mannequin, who in a neatly ironic twist is named Clay. "It involves sitting for a few hours with a plastic mask, completely deprived of all hearing or sight, while I direct him bit by bit and change masks on his face. We can't do half an hour of that every week, but we can do a few minutes and intercut it with drawn stuff. Anything you can throw a stick at, actually."

It took six weeks to knock a half-hour version of Angry Kid into shape - a glimpse inside the mind of the ginger-spiked rage merchant, entitled Who do you think you are?. Pitched as a visual essay response to a question from an exasperated teacher, the film recounts mini fantasies in a hacked-together sketchbook style. "I'd like to do more Angry Kid, but I've grown up a bit since then," admits Darren. "It's more like Disgruntled Old Man now."

TELLING TALES

With abstract collage animator Robert Breer as her greatest inspiration, Lizzy Hobbs graduated from Edinburgh in 1991 and spent nearly ten years printmaking and making artists' books. "It's a completely different field to animation, but it is about storytelling," she reflects. She went on to take a one-year diploma in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College.

"I found a rostrum camera - which to me was a complete revelation - and brought my printmaking stuff in. No-one else was using the rostrum, so I just put my stuff under there and made a little animation. One sheet of paper and wet fluids, recording whilst it's still wet. That seemed the most logical and economical way of doing it."

Her student film, The Last Regret of the Grim Reaper, won her a commission through Channel 4's animate! scheme to tell a quirky tale of Napoleon Bonaparte's private parts, entitled The Emperor. Since then, she believes, luck's been on her side. Following a commission in Scotland called The Witches, the National Film Board of Canada got in touch - they'd seen The Emperor, and liked it.

Luckily, a recently-declined application for Channel 4's Animators in Residence scheme was lying around, so she popped that in the post and got the commission. "So I finished The True Story of Sawney Beane, about a Scottish cannibal, in 2005 - then became a mum so things stopped for a little while, just to give birth."

SMELLS LIKE TEAM SPIRIT

Suzie: A lot of animators get into it because they want total control. For me, live action is terrifying. It's hectic; people are throwing questions at you all the time. On Peter and the Wolf I didn't animate at all, I directed - and it was a bit like that. I think a live action shoot would be 100 times faster. At least with animation you've got time to think, and I'm a slow thinker.

William: We work in a very non-linear way; build it all up to a certain level and then build it all up to the next level. The producer gets quite frustrated - 'Why won't you finish that shot?' - but there's usually deadline pressure, and there's rarely nothing that could be improved. But problems get smaller and smaller until no-one notices.

Darren: Working with a crew is a whole different experience. When you're directing you need to do it in so few words that it just stays in the animator's mind. We were doing a little script with some actors from The Bill and I got told off for talking too much: 'Trim it down, you're confusing the actors.' Animators need a motivation for their character, but leave it open to interpretation so they've got something to bring to it as well.

Suzie: I found it really difficult handing over the animation. Some of them were really good, some of them were beginners. Once you hand over a shot it's out of your control - there's always other things to do. You brief them and let them get on with it. But it's harder living with someone else's mistakes than with your own.

Lizzy: It's problematic when you're developing a script with a large team, all having a go at your first draft. With Sawney Beane I was in Canada, pregnant, and had two months left to finish it. I thought that if I addressed everyone's points it would be the perfect film, and it just wasn't.

Susie: You need to have your own stubborn will throughout, while staying open to the good bits. The sculptress who did Peter's face didn't speak a word of English. We pointed at things and smiled and got on really well for the first couple of models, but she started to get tired; lose her confidence. I told her to stop listening to me and find her own truth in her work.

LINKS

www.breakthrufilms.co.uk
www.framestore-cfc.com
www.aardman.com
www.passion-pictures.com
www.spellboundanimation.co.uk

Text: Nick Carson