An early animation
31/03/12 16:31
"Alvar the Cat & the Bank Robbers" - one of my first attempt to make a animated movie.
Only the half of the story was finnished.
My blog celebrates its 10th anniversary this year and I am putting up some previously unpublished work (see previous post).
Now has the time come to one of my first animations I did in my teens. When I was 12 years old, I bought a super-8 camera. I wanted to do animation, but the camera I’ve bought had no single-frame button. I wanted my film to look like cell animation, but I was too mean to buy the cells (or transparencies that I thought were used). One hundred sheets in a box and 24 frames per second, it would be a lot of money for just a few seconds movie! Well, I made a cheaper kind of cutoutfilm which was supposed to look like cell animation.
The first attempt I made was with my cartoon Miskot, who was a dog living in the woods. The story was a simple gag I stole from "Smurf stories". When I was filming my small drawings I had a low light and the result was not so much to be desired. In addition, the film was flickering because of all short exposures. I learned the lesson, I bought a new film camera with single-frame button and I got a 1000-watt spotlight as birthday gift.
"Alvar the Cat & the Bank Robbers" was based on a comic strip I´ve done in my youth called
"The Hard Banana". For the film version, it was renamed. Click to read!
For the next attempt I used Alvar the Cat, another of my childhood comic strip characters. This new film was based on one of the short stories, called "The Hard Banana". In the film version, the story was renamed to "Alvar the Cat & the Bank Robbers" because the original title was very much like a porno video available at the Esso gas station that my friend Jesper's father owned.
About half of the 12-page story was animated for the movie, then I wanted to get the film processed to see the results. The rest of the film was never finished, which unfortunately has been a recurring theme in many of my indie projects.