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This ten-minute animated short was my graduation project in the final year of my film degree. The story concerns a teenage Victor Frankenstein trying to build Pamela Anderson in the lab. Naturally, a certain flat-headed, bolt-necked monster puts in an appearance before too long…

 

I shot it on Super-8 film with stop-motion puppet characters on miniature sets. The puppets were just DIY versions of those bendy toys you can get: I sculpted each one in plastiline, made a two-part plaster mould, placed a simple pipe-cleaner armature inside and then slushed in liquid latex to end up with a poseable rubber duplicate. The characters’ heads were made of Super Sculpey, with interchangeable heads for different expressions. Things like the film’s titles and occasional linking shots were accomplished using paintings and cut-out and cel animation.

 

Funny to think, but these traditional methods were really all that were available at the time; this was before the digital revolution had really kicked in (or, at least, before the digital revolution had filtered down into cash-strapped colleges). For all that, probably the thing that dates it most is the Pamela Anderson reference.

 

You know how things like Wallace And Gromit are supposed to take as long as two years to film? Due to lack of equipment availability, we had to shoot this baby in a week and a half. Everything was down to me and my trusty sidekick James Allan: setting up the miniatures, positioning the lights, operating the camera, doing the animation… zzzzz.

 

Obviously, corners were not so much cut as hacked off with a 18” circular saw. Half the shots featured the characters just standing still and blinking - ah, the old labour-saving Hanna-Barbera trick…

 

Despite the dodgy animation, the finished short turned out OK. It was nicely lit, most of the stuff in it looked decent, plus there were some funny moments once in a while. I came away from it with my degree under one arm and a big stack of photos and artwork for my portfolio under the other. Which, aside from the Oscar, is all I could’ve hoped for…

 

 

THE ART COLLEGE YEARS…

 

STUDENT:

JESSICA

BUTTERWORTH

STUDENT:

CRISPIAN

McLEISH

STUDENT:

THOMAS

CARRUTHERS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jessica’s canvas deliciously addresses the struggle against categorisation that the young painter faces today, vigorously combining both the abstract and the figurative to pyrotechnical effect

Crispian’s sculpture represents an intriguing cross-pollination of the anthropomorphic and the inanimate, hinting at the symbiosis between man and machine at the dawn of the 21st Century

Thomas made this funny rubber gonk in class this week

 

 

 

 

 

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