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Babylon
- David Sproxton / Peter Lord
- United Kingdom, 1985
- 14 min.
Aardman Animations I
70 minutes
One rainy afternoon sometime around 1970 – nobody can ever remember the exact date or even the year - two schoolboys sat down at the kitchen table to experiment with the basics of frame-by-frame filmmaking. The boys were me and my mate Dave Sproxton, and the course we started on still continues nearly forty years later - though sadly the kitchen table got lost somewhere along the way.
We had no particular aim in view on that lucky day; somebody just told us it was fun. That first film still exists. It’s incredibly primitive, it’s barely animated at all, it has no narrative, and an analytical viewer can tell exactly when we became bored with the whole process and just wanted to hurry up to the finish so we could send the film off to the labs (Film? I hear you ask. Labs? It’s a historical process, look it up on Wikipedia). But I remember the result. I remember the sheer magic of the thing; that we’d spent a few hours working away at a table with a camera, and bits of paper and chalk and a couple of toy cars – to produce an event, a performance, that had never actually existed before. We’d brought something to life. We were animators.
(see catalogue for full program text)
This program screened as part of HAFF 2008
Showing in this program
Babylon
Going Equipped
Loves Me Loves Me Not
Morph: Swimming and Disco
Shaun the Sheep: Save the Tree
Stuff vs Stuff: Sprouts versus Beans
Wallace & Gromit – The Wrong Trousers (OV)
Wallace takes in a new lodger, a devious penguin. Sporting some techno-trousers, the penguin plans a grand theft, a plan that involves putting Wallace in danger.
