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I am
highlighting some areas of work that I have done in the past. I have not
included other or smaller jobs, that also involved craftwork, moldmaking and
some modelmaking. Most of the work I did was as a freelancer or subcontracted
work, and therefore, you will not usually see a screen credit for some of the
work I did.
I am updating this in '03 .... I am now listed
at the |
In the late 1 980's I worked as a Stop-Motion animator of the original Clay
Icon, Gumby, for American television. This character, created by Art
Clokey now seems so inn ocent but still endures. There are quite extensive listings on the
internet, just on Gumby ! Looking back now, what an awesome
opportunity....
learning to Stop-Motion animate on the job! I will
never forget those 10 second animation quotas per day (from each
animator, shooting on two's). The picture on the left, many years later and I
am older but Gumby & Pokey have not aged at all! Some great animators came
from those Gumby beginnings....Karen Kiser is now a top CG animator at Pixar
....Mike Belzer, Steve Buckley, Angie Glocka, Tim Hittle, Owen Klatte, Eric
Leighton, Anthony Scott, and Trey Thomas are Nightmare Before Christmas
alumni, and have also gone into computer animation. A few have returned to Stop
Motion but I hope that they will all, someday, "come home" to their Stop Motion
Animation roots. |
 After that, I did some B-movie work, and one movie that we all might
have forgotten about, The Chilling, starring Linda Blair, Dan "Grizzly
Adams" Haggerty, and Troy Donahue ! I also met them all, in person! Linda Blair
was really cool. She starred in The Exorcist, which is now a classic and
one of my  most favorite
movies. Low, low, budget and I do not think the film broke any box office
record. I was primarily an assistant, mold maker, and helping with fabrication
of the latex Zombie masks & appliances. I also fabricated miniature
Cryo-Chambers for a high-speed explosion special effects shot and I designed a
rig where a zombie / stunt person appears to be skewered by a forklift blade.
The businessman, who owned a company that manufactured cellular antenna towers,
decided to try his hand at making movies....he wrote, produced & directed
The Chilling. I think it was a very expensive hobby for
him! |
 In this venture I got a chance
to 'taste' the corporate world of Media Communications. Unlike the ubiquitous
commercials on television, the public usually never sees these
advertisement-like pieces. Anyway, the project required over 30 seconds of clay
animation for Amdahl Corporation (in Silicon Valley); about their
contributional support of United Way. They had a p roducer, writer / director & an
art director, and I was the 'technician', who created the miniature sets, the
finished animateable clay puppets (about 10), then using my workhorse Bolex;
the marathon animation and the entire job, took only about 2 weeks ! It was
very rushed & the animation not so finessed. Then another job for Tandem
Computers, basically fabricating a large muppet-type character used for their
in-house weekly TV shows for their employees. |
 Then, my big-time shot into Stop-Motion (well, sort of); I was hired by
Skellington productions as a freelancer to fabricate a large number of
animation armatures for the secondary -background puppet characters for The
Nightmare Before Christmas. This mass production of armatures was really
going to be an acid test of all my previous secretive experimentations of
armature making. I used alternative fabrication methods that did not require
the use of a machining mill or lathe. At that time, I mostly used, just a drill
press! Well, I found out really fast that I still had a little more to learn
and the Nightmare work exposed some weaknesses of my armatures, but
this "trial by fire" situation accelerated my knowledge in designing and
fabricating very strong, basic & functional animation armatures. To this
day, my animation armature  fabrication methods use only minimal & basic machining (not overly
complex machine work) but they are very precision made and function just as
good as fully machined "bells & whistles" armatures. Also on
Nightmare, I had the opportunity to do some animation assisting;
mostly technical stop motion, like animating opening gates, the funeral wagon
car, the background traveling elements, etc.. |
 While I was finishing up on
Nightmare, I got a call from Tippett Studios to fabricate basic ball
& socket armatures, for "poseable puppets", of the main dinosaurs for the
now legendary breakthrough CGI movie Jurassic Park. The armatures I
made for Phil were f ully realized
into finished foam and painted puppets, but were never used for animation
purposes. I got to meet the Stop-Motion Puppet Meister....the Main
Dude....Phil Tippett ! What I like about Phil, is that he comes from a
Stop-Motion background and fully understands & appreciates the tactile
nature of the puppet animation art; you have got to Feel the
animation movements within your body. He used these articulated puppets as a
visual aid to guide the computer animators at Industrial Light & Magic,
to experience and feel the sensory, hands-on method of positioning the
puppets into dynamic poses.---- |
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