My earliest memory of understanding animation was all thanks to cereal. Yep, remember when cereal used to have the free toys in them? In a way I owe my damn life to them! When I was very young, I got an "Aah! Real Monsters!" flipbook in my cereal, and when flicking through the pages, went through the heart breaking moment every child goes through when they realise that cartoon characters aren't real people.
I loved my cartoons as a kid, mainly Cartoon Network, shows like "Dexters Lab", "Ed, Edd and Eddy", and admittedly, "The Powerpuff Girls" (who'd have known that I'd later be sucked into another Lauren Faust related franchise recently). However, due to having a younger sister, my exposure to cartoons was limited to things that we both agreed on. I was also somewhat sheltered from the evils of the universe as far as I can remember.
There were a fair few shows I remember not being allowed to watch, I remember the number of Dragonball Z episodes I was allowed to watch slowly falling to zero, and repeats of Pokemon also withered, yet watching the same 3episodes of Dexters Lab was acceptable. And now to deliver a crippling blow to the hearts of animators worldwide. I didn't have a huge exposure to Disney. My mother dislikes the films, so I did all my Disney watching at my Dad's house, I can remember my favourites being The Aristocats, Snow White and Jungle Book.
So far it sounds like I didn't exactly have the best exposure to cartoons, right? And surely that's the complete opposite of your typical animator. The thing is, that's exactly what made me want to animate. Call it an act of rebellion or whatever the hell you want, but you should know that when you tell a kid he can't do something, he's obviously going to do it for shits and giggles.
When I was in school, I was sat in class one day. The computer rooms were right next to our classroom so we could hear what was going on. One fateful day the silence in class was broken by a sound from the heavens. The great Jonti Picking spoke the following heavenly words to me through a computer:
"Badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers! Mushroom! Mushroom!"I had discovered web animation. A place where I could watch cartoons about almost anything on the internet, free of limits of what my sister and mother approved of. And I loved it.
Once I'd passed that border, my head was just crammed full of an explosion of videos, ranging from the work of David Firth to Egoraptor. These were my first main inspirations. To this day I still tell people that I want to meet Weebl one day just to thank him for introducing me to this world of web animation.
At the time I didn't have access to Flash, so for years I was using Powerpoint to make animations. Rather than going out at a break in school, I'd stay in the computer rooms and make (terrible) stick man animations with my friend. For a few years, this was as far as I went. I was happy just to make stupid gif videos in PowerPoint until one day in year 10 at school, my art class held the annual Arts Week, one of the topics being animation.
2 weeks later, this piece of crap was produced.
This is when I decided what I wanted to be. There was something about bringing life to these things that caused a spark in me, and got me into animation.
Shortly after making this video I got myself a webcam and threw together some stop motion animations of my own. At the time I was inspired by Robert Benfer and his clay animations (again, web animation over say, something like Aardman!) I made some animations featuring red claymen and started up my first site here (warning, it's awful)
After some time, my site moved from shitty, free piczo to a shitty Dreamweaver site, of which I've lost the original copy. Clayos.co.nr was made, and eventually in 2007, Clayos.co.uk.
Eventually, I got sick of stop motion and moved onto Flash, closer to my original influences and have been chasing animation since then...
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