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 make a few home movies with it as well. But one feature of the camera that caught my eye was the single frame mode. So I convinced friend’s 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 bit though 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 it’s own, so I wrote a simple Basic program to create a simple explosion and I shot it off the TV screen frame by frame.

I did not do any more animations after these but these bring back many good memories. I hope you enjoy them too. Let me know which bits are your favorites in the comments.

9 minutes.