Interview with Garfield Vassell: Action!

Animator Garfield Vassell tells Shannon Denny about his mission to help kids to get a move on


Given the fact that he shares his name with the world's most famous cartoon cat, you might think Garfield Vassell was predestined to become an animator. He was in fact named for a professional cricketer admired by his father, but as a 10-year-old Streatham schoolboy, Garfield had already decided what he wanted to do with his life - and it wasn't batting or bowling.

"Being a little lad, too young to have a part-time job, every little bit of pocket money would go on something to do with film or animation," he says. Inspired by The Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts and King Kong, he'd spend his savings at the newsagent on the latest issue of Cinemagic, a magazine for kids. "I got myself a little cine-camera, a little 8mm, in 1979. I still have it to this day - a Chinon Super-8."

A few decades later and Garfield is spreading his enthusiasm for the moving image to the next generation. When he's not busy working on personal projects (he has three pilots soon to be unveiled at animation festivals in Cannes and beyond), the Crystal Palace resident teaches kids as young as six how to bring Plasticine models to life on screen.

Brushing aside a pair of tiny blue Plasticine hands from the lid of a box and carefully withdrawing a model of Simon Cowell, Garfield breaks down the basics of animation for me. There's 2D animation, which is cartoons, while 3D animation (also called 'stop-action' or 'stop-frame') involves an object being carefully adjusted between takes of motion picture film. When the film is played back, the object appears to move. CGI - or computer-generated - animation is the latest incarnation, allowing objects to be manipulated digitally, rather than physically, on a computer screen.

Having studied under Rhubarb and Custard creator Bob Godfrey while gaining his degree in animation at West Surrey College of Art and Design, Garfield knows his way around all three. His greatest affinity, however, is for stop-action work. While his expertise has led to work for commercial studios on short films watched as far away as France, Canada and the Middle East, he reveals, "Any animator will tell you their dream is to make their own film." With this in mind, he set up his own studio, Brown Bowler Animation.

The name is another one that Garfield can thank his father for. "This is the brown bowler," grabbing a well-loved hat from a shelf. "This was my dad's hat when he came over from Jamaica, we're talking the Windrush years. When we were in college our course was geared towards us going out and starting on our own, so everyone was thinking of business names, and I used to wear this around college."

In 1997, Brown Bowler Animation began leading workshops to share the art form with organisations, summer schemes and young offenders' institutions. Garfield explains, "It teaches them to work together, to communicate, to get their creative juices, their imagination going, gets them to engage with each other, solve problems, it teaches them about storytelling - there's so much."

The demand became so great that now Garfield offers mini-workshops for kids, and his Get Animated parties absorb most weekends. The effect on participants is reminiscent of his own early fascination with film. He describes a recent birthday: "When I came the mother said, 'You've got 10 really hyper girls out there, seven-year-olds... good luck!' They said 'Can we help you set up?' So I was showing them what to do, and it was all quiet. The mother came down and said, 'We've been trying to control them for the last 45 minutes since they've all got here, and you've just turned up and there's order!'"

The girls quickly concocted an elaborate mystery story involving an explosion of popcorn in a theatre with a Poirot-inspired FBI detective who happens to be a penguin. "So their imagination was going crazy!" he says. "And this is a lot of seven-year-olds - within 10 minutes they came up with that."

During the two-hour parties, kids devise a plot and translate it into storyboards. Next they make backgrounds and models; Garfield assigns crewmembers to various tasks as the process of animation unfolds. Take by take, the computer screen reveals the magic transformation of their ideas into a movie. They can take a DVD of their work home, and some shorts even make it onto Garfield's website. "It does amaze me the amount of creativity these youngsters have. As you get older that can be lost."

Of course, that's hardly something Garfield needs to worry about for himself, clearly as captivated now as he was when he hoarded pennies to pursue his passion as a kid. "Essentially the core is the love of the moving image," he says as the Plasticine head of Simon Cowell bobbles slightly as if in agreement. "As long as I'm pushing a bit of something around I'm happy, I'm happy!" he laughs.

www.get-animated.co.uk

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