Thursday, October 16, 2008

Simps Indian Adventure - 1996

In 1986 I travelled to India for the first time and then spent years and years making a clunky cartoon about my experiences there. It was my first dip into animation and also computers.

This film actually took 10 years to complete!

I had prepared the entire film as a cutout animation project, each drawing was inked and coloured in on A4 paper and then cut out with a very sharp scalpel blade to be filmed under a 16mm bolex camera on a home made rostrum stand. Then computers came along and I realized I could scan in all the artwork, digitize it.

The entire film was eventually filmed with an Arriflex 35mm camera rigged up with a capping shutter and programmed to take a frame at a time off a 15 inch RGB monitor - a very rudimentary form of Telecine. I was helped enormously by Nicolas Register, who modelled the dream sequence in the first version of 3D studio and I had lent the Arriflex camera off Graeme Jackson, a brilliant animator and dear friend who sadly passed away just after the film was completed.