Getting Personal - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 68

Stop motion and me! - Simon Partington, CG visual effects artist
When I was young I had a topic about a tortoise that got lost in the woods and had to ask the other
woodland creatures for help to fi nd his way home. I owned quite a few topics, but this was special
because the illustrations were photographs of little model worlds. There was a depth to this topic that
the others didn't have and I'm sure I thought that these photographs were real, taken by someone
documenting this little tortoise's adventures. Although the images were obviously not moving, this was
the start of my love for stop motion animation.
I vividly remember watching Cosgrove Hall's Pied Piper of Hamelin in the school holidays. It frightened
and excited me in equal measures. The puppets in the fi lm looked so real to me. It was mysterious and
magical. There were rats that spoke and strange lights in mountainsides, and for a young boy with a wild
imagination this was all quite incredible.
The Flumps , the Wombles and Chorlton and the Wheelies also fascinated me as a child. I was desperate
to visit Wimbledon Common, convinced that the Wombles must exist and that if we could only go and
look under the bushes we'd be able to meet them. My love of making things began to kick in. I remember
someone bought me some little Womble miniature models and I set off on the quest to build my own
Womble burrow, keeping me quiet for several days one summer. I remember a certain frustration that my
Wombles didn't move like the ones on TV. My Granddad suggested that we should make a Womble of my
own using his pipe cleaners as a kind of bendy skeleton and some Plasticine. I quickly set about emptying
all of the local stores of Plasticine and pipe cleaners as the characters began to come thick and fast.
Schoolwork suffered as I thought of getting home to create more of these characters. I'd already made some
fl ick topics and although seeing the little stick men jump about was fun it did seem pretty primitive. My
parents, who have always been a huge support in my endeavours, had a topic about cine photography and
for my thirteenth birthday I was bought my fi rst cine-camera. Instead of a trigger it had a cable release and
we set about making our fi rst epic. We built a makeshift rostrum camera made from a wooden frame with a
plywood base, drilled a hole in the wooden crossbar and attached the camera with a tripod screw. My fi rst
fi lm was of four cut-out paper squares and a man painted onto a sheet of paper a frame at a time.
We sent off the fi lm and waited. After what seemed like an eternity (it was fourteen days) the little 8 mm fi lm
canister arrived its paper yellow jacket. We nervously loaded it into the viewer that we had bought from the
old local record shop. We switched on the little lamp and began to turn the fi lm. There it was, basic, yes, but
nothing up to that point in my life had given me such encouragement as to what was possible. Other than
the odd hand in shot where Dad or I hadn't been fast enough to get out of the way, the fi lm was perfect.
The squares danced around and the little painted man arrived on the screen in his little painted house. I
thought that we had made magic that only we knew how to do. None of my friends had much of an interest
at this point, and Dad and I had made our fi rst animated fi lm. Many more experiments followed in quick
succession. A jointed wooden mannequin from the local art store made all sorts of things possible. Soon we
had him in all situations: being tied up with string that had come alive, trying to escape the hand of God as
it reached down to grab him, pens and pencils would come alive and chase him around the room; anything
went. It was guerrilla fi lm-making at its best! All of this experimenting led to me being able to make a short
animation for my GCSE exam. The fi lm was much more ambitious than anything I had made before and was
based (rather topically) on the subject of global warming.
Through the years my career has gone in the direction of CGI rather than stop motion, but I still have
fond memories of making those fi rst fi lms. It was a brilliant time, without deadline or pressure; animation
for the fun of it, and it started me on a journey that would become a hobby, a passion and a career.