In today’s lesson, we had a guest speaker. Tim Allen, a professional Stop Motion Animator, spoke to us about his career so far. Tim has been a professional animator for the past 21 years. He has worked on various films and series, for example; Isle of Dogs, Shaun the Sheep, Postman Pat, Fireman Sam, Bunny and the Bull, Fantastic Mr Fox, Frankenweenie, Peter and the Wolf and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.

Tim talked about how he has always had a love for art, cartoons and comics and that he knew at a young age that he wanted to have an art career. Also, he loved making things in the art using his hands. He did an Art & Design B Tech, followed by a Degree in Animation. Things did not go too smoothly for Tim in the beginning, especially at University when he did a man on a toilet as his first stop motion project. This was his biggest failure. He was ridiculed for his inadequate work, and it was badly received by his Tutors. Tim knew that he really had to up the game now for them to take him seriously. He worked well into the evening and weekends to prove himself and to make a good impression. Tim made a stop motion called Bucketing Down. He did all the work, from making the puppets to making the animation.

When Tim graduated, he took on some work experience jobs, working for free and then some low-paid jobs as he said you have to start somewhere and work your way up. His first animation was working on a children’s animation called El Nombre, which was very basic, with no eye movements or facial gestures etc. just arm movements. Fireman Sam was for 18 months his longest project and then Creature Comforts, which differed from what he was used to as he had to work with plasticine. Tim went five years in and out of work.

Tim explained how you can only achieve 6-15 seconds of work a day, as it is very time-consuming to make a stop motion video. Sometimes you can achieve less. He mentioned that once it took 12 to 13 hours of work a day on just 2 seconds of animation. Tim’s worst achievement was when he made 1 second of animation in one day on the Flying Piano, which was the most difficult situation, and he was a supervisor.

Tim Allen didn’t say he had a favourite project, however, Corpse Bride was really the start of his career as he had to learn to change his style to more accurate, realistic, (he was now working with a big Director) features like pupils in eyes and knuckles on fingers, he ended up getting lead animator for Barkis then failed on Victoria’s expression, but in the end, sorted it.

I found Tim Allen very interesting to listen to and to see some of his work was amazing. It made me realise how time-consuming being a stop motion animator can be. You need a lot of patience. For example, 18-20 shots just placing something in a box and crawling around on your hands and knees on set was very much a part of it. It can be a very tedious job. When I was about 9 years old, I had a go at making stop motion videos for fun. They were very basic but very time-consuming for me, so I get how frustrating scenes can be for the animator. However, I think the reward at the end is worth it.

These images are production images of the films Tim has worked on.