Three Square Wheels animation!

Hello everyone and welcome to what I hope will be an interesting and enjoyable blog. This is my first attempt at blogging and I am using this avenue to show people some of my work and to give people a look at the animation projects I am working on right now and the method to my madness.

Firstly, about myself. My name is Neil Hughes and I am 36 years old living in Melbourne Australia with my wife and three kids. My art background is limited to high school art classes. I went to university graduating with a science degree majoring in chemistry and worked in different laboratories in the chemical industry for several years. Sick of the repetitive nature of lab work I moved across into technical sales which offered more human interaction and varied work.

After I had finished my degree I was determined to try something more entertaining and the tipping point came in the form of a short film by Aardman Animations. “The Wrong Trousers” turned my world upside down for the next ten years.

I have always had a love of animation. I watched countless cartoons as a kid. I had a special interest in looney tunes (Daffy in particular) and some of the Hanna Barberra shows. I loved the eighties sci fi shows of Astro Boy, Star Blazers, G Force, Transformers etc. (When merchandising was in its innocent youth) but I also had a love of the claymation work coming out of Aardman in particular Morph. The Wrong Trousers reawoke my love of animation and I decided I would try my hand at claymation.

This lead to the purchase of an old super 8mm film camera that could take single frames and I set about building a film set and characters out of clay and aluminium wire. I found a good introduction book on animation at the local bookstore scoured the net for information.

My first project was an ambitious (I always want to start big!) mock commercial of a family watching television and fighting over the remote. The set and camera occupied the spare room for several months but I finally finished my shoot and sent the film off to be processed. I eagerly waited on its return, and when it did show up, I spooled it on an old 8mm projector to view it….. It was virtually all out of focus! The camera I was using had a reflex viewfinder and so I couldn’t tell that the focus was out. The wide angle shots were okay, but all the close ups were out of focus. Strangely enough I was not devastated by this, I laughed.

Even though the shots were out of focus I could still see the characters move and I still got that buzz of seeing something inanimate come to life. I still get that buzz everytime I see my animation move, it is one of the main attractions to this art form for me.

I then found an after hours short course on claymation running at a local technical college which I signed up for. I got along well with the teacher who was impressed with my puppetmaking ( It turned out I was quite good at sculpting). He asked me to assist him with a similar course he was running at an adult education college in Melbourne where I would be the puppet making guru!

It was at this point that I took my next big step towards animation. One of the students in this course approached me after the course and asked If I would like to work on a project together. Roger Ferdinando was an ex professional photographer who had had an interesting and varied employment history including working in a film processing lab in Western Australia where he processed the film stock for the original Mad Max film!

Roger had the idea to make an interactive CD storybook with clayanimated segments withing the story. Over the next few months in between everyday life commitments like work and family we made puppets shot test shots etc. Roger worked for a computer company so we had access to a lot of computer resources and he was also the brother in law of one of the directors so we were given a little money to get us started.

When we finally showed the company what we were doing they asked if we could make a short film. We were a bit surprised at this but said we could. I don’t know if it was a tax break or not for the company but they gave us some money as together Roger and I created Doghouse Films.

The result of Roger and My collaboration was a 13 minute stopmotion film called “Porter’s End” It was a story about a day in the life of elderly couple and their little friend. The whole production took about 2 years to make, fitting animation into our normal lives on weeknights and weekends. Our wives were very patient with us!

However production ground to a halt with the birth of my second child. Work and the new addition was too much. This situation lead to the next step in my animation journey.

The company that Roger worked for liked what they saw of the film, and decided that we needed to finish it without any delays. Roger persuaded them to finance Doghouse films full time and I was offered a job. A had to make my first big decision whether or not to pursue animation as a potential career. Fortunately for me I had a supportive wive and family that were happy for me to “follow my dream” so I resigned my chemical industry job and started working full time on Porter’s End for Doghouse films.

In January 2000 we finally finished the film and started entering it in film festivals around the world. We also started working on other projects for doghouse films to generate work. Unfortunately Porter’s End did not have much luck on the festival front, but it did screen at a local festival in Ringwood Melbourne, and also in Mexico! so there must be some strange correlation between those two divergent film audiences!

Looking back on the film it does run too long. We could have cut it back to 6min and lost none of its impact but the production values, sets ,props , sound editing and music were first rate.

Sadly after a few more months doghouse films had to close as the company that Roger and I worked for was sold and the new owners had no interest in doghouse films.

So I was now unemployed! Money was okay as the owners had compensated me well for the closure of the company but it would not last for ever. Eventually I had to start looking for work again and I got a technical sales job back in the chemical industry again. This was a bit of a blow after the creative freedom I had enjoyed at doghouse.

At about that time I became aware of the graduate diploma course in animation running at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. This is a very prestigous school whose graduates include well known international independant animators like Adam Elliot (Oscar winner Harvey Crumpet), Anthony Lucas (The Adventures of Jasper Morello, Oscar nominee), Dennis Tupicoff and Sarah Watt. They only took a few students each year into the course and competition was fierce. I put in my application not expecting to get in but surprisingly I was accepted! I now had to make another big decision so I again quit my job and started my next animation step at the VCA.

My time at the VCA was simply amazing. I have never been in such a environment before which fostered some much creative exploration. It pushed you to try different things and the lecturers and the fellow students I worked with were truly inspirational. I produced two stopmotion films during my year at the VCA. A 45 sec piece called “Street Entertainment” and My graduation film “Metal World” . These films have since gone on to screen in several film festivals around the world and Metal World picked up a couple of awards at local film festivals.

Following my time at VCA, I made a conscious effort to develop a career in Animation. I secured some freelance model making work on a couple of short films and I worked on a few commercials for Glen Huntwick Productions, a local producer of high quality stopmotion advertisements. However this work was too infrequent to make a regular living (I had a family to support) and unfortunately the animation industry in Melbourne (in particular stopmotion) was very hard to break into. I spent a fair bit of time learning 3ds max to broaden my skills as well, but I fast reached the limitations of my computer. I also did not have the space at home for stopmotion projects.

The stress of trying to make a living in animation put a lot of strain on my family and I was not enjoying the thing that I loved so much. Eventually I had to go back yet again to the science industry and  now I am currently employed as a technical sales person.

For a year or so I only occasionally picked up a pencil but I have slowly been working on an idea now and then, waiting for the passion and  motivation to return.

And so we arrive at today. I am still working full time, and my family has grown. Three young kids are a joyful handful!

I am close to finishing the first draft of my short film project and I will then begin to get an estimate of the length of this idea and then start the fun part of cutting, changing, restaging the work to bring it all together.

The first draft I find is so hard, but it is just getting the parts in place, getting from A to Z. To tell the story in its basic parts. Once I am over that hurdle it is very liberating.

Okay, that is enough for now. In conjunction with this blog I will be redesigning my personal web site to show my work. I hope to like what you see and read and check back often.

Cheers!

Neil