Back in the late 1970’s I inherited a Super 8 film camera from my granddad. He used it for home movies and I ended up making a few with it as well. However, one feature of the camera that caught my eye was the single-frame mode. So I convinced friends of mine to help me create some animations. For the first ones I just used toys that I had around the house – matchbox cars and my sister’s stuffed animals. Eventually we also got in front of the camera ourselves and hammed it up.

One of my favorite animation bits were some very crude attempts at computer animation. The very first computer I had was a Timex Sinclair ZX-81. It did not have a graphics chip and could not do animation on its own, so I wrote a simple Basic program to create a simple explosion and I shot it off the TV screen frame by frame. It was time consuming but effective. 

My favorite animation techniques was using cutouts. They are easy to do and you can do some pretty silly stuff with them.

I did not do any more animations after these examples but watching them brings back many good memories. I hope you enjoy them too.

9 minutes.