Born of parents Mary and Arnold, a long lanky baby (or so I've been told) came into the world one day in December and bellowed out aloud "I wanna be an animator!" Nobody could understand this badly inbetweened squirming pink thing at the time and so the little tike's dream had to wait another 20 years or so until it could lip-synch properly in English...."Naa wahhnaa bplh unn anamataaaa..!"

Family roots

 

Prior to discovering the joys of teaching in 1983, I ran my own business called 'Gnome's Moving Things'. For some reason, I had been given the name 'gnome' by a particularly talented fellow student at film school. "Hello gnome", he would say, taking delight in drawing out the word in a haunty upper class English accent. I think the nick-name came about a result of my passionate interest in sound. On location, (since the school had no gun mics in its early days) I'd hide in the bushes, like a garden gnome, trying to get as close to the actors as possible in order to capture the best quality recordings. Anyway, I decided to use this name and the image at the left is from my business card at the time. It attempted to sum up the animation process - laboriously stitching images together frame by frame, working into the wee hours of the morning. For ten years or so I produced animated television commercials, shot and edited documentary films and created title and credit sequences. Some of the work from this period of my life is shown elsewhere on these pages. My prime creative tool was the animation rostrum camera.