Animator

Mark Bretherton

Animators have a reputation as ”the mad ones” at art college; something stop-motion animator Jason Lynch believes is fairly justified.

“Generally we’re all a pack of weirdos,” he said. “The best example I can give was at orientation day one year where the college had brought in a jumping castle. “We spent most of the day on the thing while the graphic designers just stood there and shook their heads.”

Although having only graduated from college about five years ago, Jason already has quite a coveted feather in his cap — he worked as an assistant animator on the new Wallace and Gromit film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
The style of Wallace and Gromit is a perfect example of Jason’s preferred medium: stop-motion animation.

To create films using stop-motion animation, plasticine models are manipulated tiny amounts to create scenes — one painstaking frame at a time.
Indeed, the process is such a finicky business that the word “painstaking” may be an understatement.

Hours of effort amount to seconds of footage — provided the shoot is a success.”The longest day I’ve ever worked was about 18 hours and I did eight seconds of footage, which I was pretty pleased with,” Jason said.

“Sometimes I’ll wake up and go into the studio with a bottle of water, then I’ll come out to take a lunch break or use the toilet and find it’s dark outside.

“I like my characters’ actions to speak louder than words and, when it all flashes by in the blink of an eye, you don’t really think about the time it takes.”

The job with Aardman Animation studios for Wallace and Gromit came about through persistence and a bit of luck.

“I was in my second year at QCA when I found out the Wallace and Gromit thing was happening,” Jason said.

“It was a goal of mine to work for Aardman Studios at some point in my career and, as there wasn’t anyone locally who was into stop-motion animation, I started sending Aardman reels of my work and asked them to evaluate it. “I applied to work on the film but they were obliged to fill most of the positions with European animators.”

Jason did not give up easily.He and his wife are registered nurses so they packed up and went to the United Kingdom on a working visa where Jason did some fast talking to eventually land a job working on the film.

“I started as a trainee assistant animator and worked my way up to assistant animator,” he said.

“I got to work on a number of different things, such as the car chase scenes and the scene where the airbag explodes in Gromit’s face. “No one’s ever animated an airbag before. It took about four weeks to develop and a week to shoot.”

Jason said a problem with being a stop-motion animator was that there was no industry in Brisbane.

“Brisbane has a strong animation industry but there is not a strong stop-motion aspect. “At the moment, I am the Brisbane stop-motion animation industry but I’m interested in talking to others who want to help the scene to grow,” he said.