ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.02 - MAY 2000

Acting in Animation: A BATS Workshop

by Stephen Featherstone

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 children’s 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 Burton’s 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?
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