Richard Haynes 05/05/10
Richard Haynes is an animator and illustrator who mainly works in stop-motion animation.
He has always been passionate about drawing and acting, so he thought animation was perfect for him. He did Art in A-levels, and a Foundation Course where he produced a live action film at the end, which helped him helped him entering the Degree course he was applying for: Arts Institute at Bournemouth. There, he specialised in traditional drawn animation (stop-motion). At the end of the Degree he did a final film called The Typewriter - which couldn’t be longer than two minutes.
Richard showed us the rough animation he did on Christmas 2002 and then we saw the final one, made in June 2003.
He sent the film to the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France, and thanks to that he is working in the industry, as he met a producer from Cosgrove Hall.
He told us that the producer liked him because of his way of presenting himself, he pointed the fact that this job it’s all about meeting people.
Cosgrove Hall proposed him to do model animation, which was a challenge for him. He did little animations for kids called: Little Robots. Richard told us that every tiny model cost thousands of pounds!
He worked for them for five years. Now, Cosgrove hall has closed, because of the recession.
Recently he’s been working in Aardman Studios, where he has been working in Shaun the Sheep for 8 months.
Richard said that with Aardman everything was very different because when the contract ended, he knew he had to go find another job.
He showed us some of his showreels, which contained a lot of model animation, such as Shaun the Sheep, The postman Pat, Little Robots, Squidge and the Hardnuts (computer and model animation), etc.
I asked him if he had ever created the puppets, but he said that his work is just focused in acting and performance.
Haynes told us that what he likes about stop-motion animation is its believability, the fact that the characters actually exist, and children love that. So do I!
Mike asked him if he thinks Manchester is a good place for animation development, and Richard said that Manchester has been fantastic for him and that it has a good future in animation. He also said that in the BBC there’s a lot of animation going on.
I enjoyed very much this talk, Richard was very enthusiastic and you could tell he love his job.
I am not sure if I am going to do animation in the future, but this talk made me think of an animation technique I’ve never thought before: model animation, and the fact that you don’t need to be good at drawing to do that.
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