Growing up Animated

I am pretty sure growing up; making animated films was always a goal of mine. Once I used up an entire post-it notebook to make a stick figure animation of a snowboarder. Stop motion interested me until I found out that it takes so much time to make a scene that lasts only for a couple of seconds. To resolve this, I used those little green GI-Joe men (like the ones in Toy Story) and move them with my finger while filming. Just enough so you wouldn’t see my finger but still making it look like there was action happening. 

Another thing when I was growing up was watching animation and more specifically Claymation films like Wallace and Gromet or The Miracle Maker. The Miracle Maker The Story of Jesus, by directors Derek Hayes and Stanislav Sokolov, is especially interesting to me because of the use of not only Claymation but also transitioning to cartoon animation to show flashbacks or stories being told by Jesus. Granted the animation of the characters are somewhat  rigid and are not as fluid as later films like Wallace and Gromet but still a great personal childhood memory.