DENNIS SISTERSON Freelance animator

This challengingly-titled pre-school show was made by Collingwood O’Hare in 2002-2003 and is currently showing in the UK on C-Beebies. The fact that the characters communicate with a very limited vocabulary, consisting mainy of each others’ names and some expressive noises, meant that most of the communication had to be physical – which made the animation all the more fun and interesting to do.
This is montage of some of my scenes.

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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.

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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.)

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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?

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Here’s a family photo from about 1901, before and after being coloured in Photoshop. The colours may not all be authentic, but it’s nice to see these people looking – I hope – a little more like they did in real life rather than distanced by the illusion that our grandparents lived in another world where everything was black and white.

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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.

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Here’s a wider selection of the web banners I did for Audi a few months ago; part of the campaign that featured the TV ad of the Steinberg-esque cartoon character building a car from a cardboard box that he’s drawn on.

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This in an exercise in Photoshop and After Effects; the idea was to ‘take apart’ some classic paintings into a number or individual layers and elements then put them back together to form a three-dimensional space.

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Don’t you hate holiday videos that go on for hours? Here’s a two-minute edit of our holiday in Mallorca last summer, with a heavy helping of After Effects trickery… basically this was just an excuse to practice with that program, which is a lot of fun to use.

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Here’s a few illustrations I’ve been playing around with. The originals are for sale on my Etsy page.

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