Will Vinton with his Oscar for Closed Mondays (1974)
We validated the medium, and it opened doors.” So many people told us it wasn’t going to happen, just forget it. Back then, 99% of animation was for children and families, or two-dimensional this was neither - it was for adults, it wasn’t a kiddie film. Vinton went without financial payoff, he was lauded with credibility in theĪ quote from Vinton states that he’d accomplished his goal to “prove that clay animation was still viable. Showings, including Cannes, and became the first stop motion film to win anĪcademy Award for Best Animated Short and claimed Portland’s first Oscar. Large film festivals alike, earning the top prize at almost 100 international Though the film was initially rejected at a local Portland film festival, it was later screened before a feature by a friend of Vinton who owned a small theatre in the city, and the reception was glowing. Though the characters’ emotions and expressions were arguably viewed as “grotesque”, the mistakes and mishaps throughout the 14 months, hundreds of hours of editing, and thousands of hours sculpting, were accepted as integral to the film’s unique process by the duo.īob Gardiner (left) and Will Vinton (right) challenged themselves with using POV shots and new rack focusing techniques to find their own solutions and transform problems into positives. The face of the man in the film was a life-size bust created from a plastic skull covered in plasticine, with its contours being gradually shifted by Vinton to change expressions frame by frame. Technician, and cinematographer on short films and documentaries, the latterĬonvinced Gardiner to move to Portland, live in Vinton’s basement and help himīeing stop motion, one frame shot in Closed Mondays was required for each minuscule movement, and the 8-minute film used 11,520 single shots in total, each of which required a slight re-sculpting of the clay. Them first prize at the Berkeley Film Festival.Īfter a period of separation in which Gardiner honed his sculpting andĪnimation techniques while Vinton worked as a freelance director, sound
Which toyed with the concept of clay as a viable animation medium and earned
His editing skills with the sculpting expertise of his housemate, clay animatorīob Gardiner, the two produced Vinton’s first animation film Culture Shock,
Inspired by the counter-culture movement while attending the University of California at Berkely, Vinton had his father ship out the family’s 16mm camera and captured the local scene into a documentary called Gone For a Better Deal.Īntoni Gaudi, Vinton delved into clay experimentation for creating structures. But there are even fewer who know how the studio’s creation was born from the destruction of another.īorn in McMinnville, Oregon, on November 17, 1947, as the son of a car dealer and bookkeeper, Will Vinton was an Academy-Award winning filmmaker and animator who is considered the coiner of Claymation for his work of three-dimensional clay figures. There are few who are aware of Laika’s founder being animator and director Travis Knight, the son of Nike CEO Phil Knight. However, like many other stories behind the origins of capitalistic entities, the creation of Laika is not without arguably unethical methods.
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