Stephen Featherstone discusses his week-end training course with stop-motion animation director, Barry Purves, where he reveals he learned more than just animation skills.
The British Animation Training Scheme (BATS), based at the NFT, has been running for six years. It is a part-time course, which provides vocational training, in collaboration with working studios, for junior animation assistants. Part of BATS purpose is to develop training resources for the industry and this year, for the first time, in addition to their main course, they ran a two-day pilot workshop titled "Acting for Animation." Held at the currently closed for renovation Museum of the Moving Image, the workshop was led by the renowned animation director, Barry Purves. Like the animation assistants course, it was intended for working practitioners or those with significant experience of animation, and was designed to refresh or improve existing skills.
I came across the workshop while I was researching retraining myself as an animator. I have a background in art and design and experience in film and television production, including animation, so I roughly fitted the requirements of entry to the workshop. It seemed an ideal way of adding to my knowledge. I enrolled and in July I joined the group of a dozen or so who met in a small room deep in the dim recesses of the Museum of the Moving Image.
A New Approach
The rest of the group was an eclectic mix, with a variety of reasons for taking the course. They included professionals with junior positions in Soho post-production houses, perhaps wanting some respite from the digital effects production line, animation students looking for the king of training not offered on their degree courses and young filmmakers close to securing funding for their first productions, seeking advice from a master.
Whatever their backgrounds, Barry Purves was the ideal person to meet them. Articulate, knowledgeable and enthusiastic, he has a prolific career which has spanned a broad section of the industry beginning at the Cosgrove Hall studios where he worked on the kind of short programmes made for childrens television that were once the mainstay of British animation. Since then he has animated and directed numerous television programmes and commercials, worked in Hollywood as the animation director on Tim Burtons Mars Attacks! and in 1992 picked up an Oscar nomination for Screen Play one of several films that he has written, directed and animated. Along the way he has taught and lectured all over the world and is responsible for training many young animators at work in the industry. Before he became an animator, Barry was an actor, which perhaps makes him uniquely qualified to teach this course.
Despite this, I suspect that most of us were wondering what was in store for us. I was once told by an animator that the basic principles of animation could be taught in an hour but it took years to gather enough experience to apply these principles fluently to any given situation and produce convincing character animations. So, what could be achieved in a two-day workshop, particularly one without cameras, puppets or video assist?
What actually took place, interspersed and illustrated by film clips, anecdotes and advice, were a series of group exercises designed to improve our powers of observation and memory and raise our awareness of the nature of movement and gesture. The workshop taught us to hone the inherent skills an animator must have and gave us ways to practice them. But beyond these practical issues the course imparted a principle. Sometimes the most useful thing that an educational experience can achieve is to undermine preconceived ideas that the participants bring to it. The workshop taught that there is more to being an animator than the skill of producing convincing movement. A command of animation techniques and practiced fluency with timing are without purpose if an animator does not understand the language of gestures and expressions that convey the inner life of a character and show what the character is thinking or feeling. The course taught that in addition to acquiring skills, an animator should learn to immerse himself in his characters as an actor would, and develop a series of distinctive gestures and plan the performance and arc of a characters journey. In other words, we were taught to think differently.
The Training Need
The animation industry in the U.K. has been expanding in recent years and continues to grow. Computer animation, with all its various applications, is likely to be one of the boom sectors in the new millennium, so training has become something of an issue. There is, apparently, a shortage of good animators to service this changing environment. There are not enough traditional drawing or puppet animators. In computer animation, while there are many well-trained technical operators, there are fewer people with animation experience. So where do courses and workshops like this fit into the range of training and education that is currently available?
The traditional talent sources for the industry -- the degree and post-graduate arts courses -- have primarily been in the business of teaching about content and developing directing talent rather than training in animation techniques. This has meant that one of the problems for the graduate seeking work, and for their prospective employers, is that students do not emerge from their courses with a skill level suitable for working studios. This has been recognized and a number of short, commercial courses have been developed through collaborations between universities and studios which provide intensive training in animation technique and produce, in the words of one course tutor, cannon fodder for the industry.
Perhaps standing somewhere between these two poles, where technique and content meet, Barry Purves week-end seminar did not eschew practical matters while it talked about the animators art. It is a valuable way of introducing new students to how a thing should move and reminding more experienced practitioners why it should move. It is therefore an excellent way of augmenting existing skills and gaining essential insight.
BATS plans to run more week-end courses in the future. In the meantime, Barry Purves is deep in pre-production on a new film, which will feature murder, mystery and music.
Stephen Featherstone was born in London in 1965. He studied Fine Art at Middlesex University where he specialized in sculpture and, following his degree, spent time as an artist in residence and a studio assistant for the sculptor Eric Bainbridge. He took a post-graduate course in film and television at the University of Bristol and has since worked for various production companies including Aardman Animations. He is currently planning to take an M.A. in Animation.
