DENNIS SISTERSON Freelance animator

I got my first cine camera when I was 15, in 1981. In those days, I think making your own films had a little more magic than it does now. This was before home video, and I was the only person I knew with a cine camera, so the rarity value had something to do with it – but it was also the fact that it was silent.. and a bit grainy… it felt like holding a filter up to the world; more so than with a modern video camera. Plus it wasn’t cheap – a four-minute reel of film cost £12 – and that was in 1981 money – so you used it sparingly; never shooting anything without thinking about it first. It was a good film-making discipline.
This film is a record of one of many days out cycling with two of my school friends. The area around my home town, Alnwick, is perfect for cycling – quiet roads, and a variety of scenery from castles and beaches to hills and moors.

Tags: Personal Projects, videos by Dennis
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It’s been 14 years since I made my first ‘Public Information Film for Hamsters’. I’ve wanted to return to my favourite creations ever since, but whenever I’ve had time for a personal project I’ve always felt obliged to use the opportunity to learn some new software, or develop some new style or technique.
I started animating this film on paper, but later decided that it would be quicker to draw straight into Flash, and was glad to find that I could do it that way without losing the ‘look’ of the characters.
I wanted to take the opportunity to speak out on an issue I care about, namely freedom of expression, and how it can be stifled by political correctness and – in my view – misplaced sensitivity.

Tags: Animation, Personal Projects by Dennis
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Going back a bit here… this is one of my student films, which did the rounds of the mountain film festivals in 1997. This taught me that if there’s a special interest group that has its own film festivals, then it’s a good idea to make films on that subject.

Tags: Animation, Personal Projects by Dennis
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I recently found this notebook amongst my stuff, from 1979 when I was 13. Although I’d been making flip-books since I was ten, this is the oldest one I’ve found.(Click on it if it doesn’t play automatically.)

Tags: Animation, Personal Projects by Dennis
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I had an interview today with Mobstar Media in Brighton, who needed someone to help produce a horrendous number of animated GIFs for downloading to mobile phones as screensavers, or something along those lines.
They asked me to do a test, which was to create a couple of GIFs featuring a heart and a skull – the most popular subject matter, apparently – so I came up with these.

As it turned out I didn’t get the job – their style is very different – but this set me thinking about the one-second animated GIF as a narrative art form as opposed to a piece of design … In an age of short attention spans, when a film much over a minute can seem too long, a film in the form of a one-second loop, on a two-inch screen, raises a challenge. How much drama can you fit into a form that small?

Tags: Animation, Personal Projects by Dennis
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When I put my showreel DVD together recently, I did a few refinements on this animated history of Arctic exploration. There’s an exhibition now on at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich on this very subject, which I’m looking forward to seeing.

Tags: After Effects, Animation, Personal Projects by Dennis
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