There's a sense of animation
as a field of transformation,
of depicting transformation
That's always been at the heart of it,
that continues today
Charcoal's a very fortuitous material
to be working with for animation,
because its tonal range kind of is
very good for photographic film,
but also because of
the speed of its transformability;
it's very easy to erase, so you can kind of
change it as quickly as you can think
And I suppose it became a way of thinking,
rather than a physical medium for me
The films are made without a script
or a storyboard
So there are one or two key images
that I know at the beginning of the film,
and I'd start with drawing those
And literally, it is, it's on day one,
when I say I want to make a film,
usually by the end of the first day
or the end of the second day,
there's film that's gone through the camera
But a drawing is done on a sheet of paper,
that's on the wall of the studio;
and halfway across the studio is the camera,
say four paces away
And I'll draw the first image of the sea,
and shoot two frames with the camera,
then walk back across the studio to the drawing,
and on the same sheet of paper, on the drawing
-not make a whole new drawing,
but just erase, for example,
the top crest of the wave,
and change the shape
of the white line minutely
Maybe add some more charcoal below
Walk back to the camera
and shoot two more frames,
and then walk back to the drawing,
and maybe make that white line fatter,
so that in fact, the foam is getting
thicker on the top of the crest of the wave;
maybe it's getting darker underneath,
add more charcoal there
Walk back to the camera and shoot two more frames,
I've now shot six frames
That sequence would continue,
with the walk between the camera and the drawing
If it's four seconds long,
that's a hundred frames, fifty walks
If it's twenty seconds long,
that's so much longer
So there are sometimes
many hundreds of alterations
on one sheet of paper
And the sheet of paper that is left
is the last frame, not of the film,
but of that sequence in the film,
of that shot
I'm not seeing what's been shot;
I have to take it on trust, what is there
All that you see at each moment
is the present-in other words,
the state of the drawing at that moment
And it's very much in the belief
that in that physical walk
between the drawing and the camera,
in that physical process-
it's not a mental process,
it's a physical process-
new images and ideas suggest themselves
to go before that shot or after that shot,
what that shot can develop into
