Getting Personal - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 83

Through the sheer joy of being able to move things did you at fi rst overdo
the animation? Have you learnt to be more disciplined?
JD - I'm more disciplined now, but I never had much of a tendency to overdo the animation.
DC - Well yes of course.
AW - Yes defi nitely, everything moved too much. I try to make gestures read more now, yes.
JC - When I fi rst started animating I was exhilarated and disappointed by what I produced. My fi rst
attempts were jerky and much too fast. There was no sense of timing or balance. I was disappointed
and felt that I could produce much better. In the interim years I've learnt to control the puppet and
more importantly, myself. Often the pauses and held poses are more important than the movement. As
Barry says, 'give the audience time to read a pose'. I now produce good work but it rarely lives up to my
imagined end result - a common feeling among animators. We are always striving to improve and reach
perfection.
Early days with Chorlton in Chorlton.
Chorlton and the Wheelies
Having proved some ability, I moved to working on Chorlton and the Wheelies . Mark
Hall remembers the birth of this landmark series: 'One morning Brian Cosgrove
announced “I've had this weird dream. There were these heads on wheels spinning
round and round, on a plate, in space!” '