Chuck’s Story
Get OUTSIDE, What are you doing in the basement all of the time????…
That’s what my Dad use to yell from the top of the steps. Video games were still a dream of some future tech nerd but in 1975 I was already staring at a screen. At 12 years old my head was always down looking into the lighted box. No. Not a phone screen. Not a video screen. Not a computer screen, non of those things existed. It was a frosted glass screen of a super 8 movie editor. I use to study animation on it. From Woody Wood Pecker to Ray Harryhausen. That’s the beginning of my story but it isn’t all that different from the ones I’ve heard from other Animators and FX professionals in the industry. I realized we all have a similar tale. Here is my version of events that eventually sparked my career in Animation.
This is the Super 8 editor that I used to watch and study animation. In front of the editor is a Bolex block film splicer. That’s how I use to piece my movies together. There is also a little glass bottle of glue that would cement the film together. From plastic model making to editing Super 8 film, my room always smelled of glue.
This is my Dad’s 8mm movie camera. He finally let me use it and eventually gave it to me. I shot my first stop motion animation on this camera using my sister’s Barbie doll and my GI Joe. The main action of that film was when the spaceship crash lands on a planet. GI Joe escapes from the crashed ship but Barbie burns a horrible death. My sister never forgave me for that. The effect was amazing and I received glowing reviews from all of my friends.
I was in the 7th grade when I first found my Fathers 8mm Movie Camera. It was tucked away in the back of the hall closet and it looked brand new. He said I could use it as long as I didn’t break it. He even bought me several rolls of Kodak film to get me going. The first images I filmed were of my friend and myself jumping off the roof of my parents house in Bellevue Washington. My interests turned to making blood bags filled with cherry Kool-aide that we would pop after being shot with my Daisy bb gun. Those were fine days where my friends and I would play outside shooting bb guns and playing war. The battles would end every night promptly at 6:00pm, dinner time.
I was a fanatic about monsters of all sorts. Werewolves, Frankenstein, Dracula, Mummy, and especially the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Even Godzilla and King Kong made the list and they could all be found in my favorite magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland.
My interest in film-making was all encompassing. I even had a subscription to Super8 Film-maker magazine. Every article had tips on camera set ups and lighting and special effects. One issue I ran across an article entitled “Feats of Clay” and it was all about Will Vinton and his Oscar winning short film, “Closed Mondays”(1975). From that moment I began making clay sculptures, clay sets, and clay animation.
This was my Go-To Magazine for film-making tips and tricks
All Clay and Heavy
I read that Will Vinton made everything out of clay so I fell into that mindset very early.
I spent my days after school in the basement making movies and creating characters to film. I even talked some of my teachers into accepting school assignments presented in the form of a film. I would show my animated clay film to the class instead of writing a paper on the subject. This was great in two ways, it let me do animation for my school work and it also kept me in the back of the class running the projector instead of standing in front of the class to give a speech.
With the success of a few good films and high marks in classes, my Dad bought me this Super8 Camera to continue making movies.
Well, it’s pretty obvious that this creature was created in the dark hormonal driven puberty junkyard of a 13 year old boy. Most of my Super 8 movies where just 2minute tests to see how lighting works or to study how choppy my animation was.
My first clay creature with a aluminum wire armature. Even his loincloth had a foil strip to animate the green fringe.
More Characters of Clay for unknown films. I would make the characters first, then come up with a scenario to put them in.
Some characters never made it into a film. This cowboy was never animated and was eventually just melted down to re-use the clay.
Living in Seattle and around Puget Sound, sooner or later, I would have to make a film that had Killer whale animation. I made a table top set that included chunks of carved paraffin wax that represented ice shelfs and bergs. The ocean was all clay with a hole in the table that my whale could breach. This animation took me days to do with the whale rising out of the water and the clay ripples and waves interacting with the puppet. Of course I do not have the footage. The film was lost due to a leaky basement wall that flooded my film closet.
The one that got away.
This was a fun animation I did when I was 16 years old. I was always thinking about world destruction and atomic bombs and the stupidity of world leaders. This scenario was set in some future time when the American people would elect a President that styled a mohawk for his hair choice. Everything was clay except for the drapes. As the President delivers a speech of safety and well being, the Capitol building blows up in the background and disappears into a mushroom cloud. I received some high marks in my social studies class for this film.
The turning point was when I went to the movie theater to watch Ray Harryhausen’s the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and became obsessed with the monsters in that film. I new it was done with Stop-Motion Animation but had no idea how they interacted with live actors. This was before Youtube and Google. The dark times. The only resource I had was the library and Famous Monsters Magazine. I would discover little clues about Ray’s animation by looking at behind the scenes pictures. Seeing tiny holes drilled into a table top gave me the answer of how the puppets could stay up right during filming. I saw the armatures in pictures before the cyclops skin was put on. Slowly, I was able to piece the stop-motion process together and I would spend days and months trying to achieve the same effect with my Super 8 films.
My animation continued through High School and Collège and I eventually built up enough work to show Will Vinton. His Studio was in Portland Oregon and it was there that I finally started to animate for a living.
So far, I have been animating for 45 years. Of course I’m including my animation days from when I was 12. I landed my first professional gig when I was 22 years old and have been doing animation ever since. As I write this, I am back in Portland Oregon where it all started for me. I’m animating on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. It is an amazing show.
My work continues professionally on Stop-Motion Puppet and CG Character feature films and commercials.
I would jump off the roof of my parents house. We all did that,… right? I also filled little plastic bags with fake blood and would pop them as I pretended to take a rifle shot. Some times the blood bag would not pop and I would spend time hitting myself in the stomach until it did. This, of course, ruined the overall effect.