British Animation of my Childhood

As the curtain falls at the end of an era of animation I thought I would reflect on the reasons why I originally got into this line of work. I thought it would be an opportunity to touch on what inspired me to animate in the first place.

I've been an animator for 36 years since I made TheVerucca Boy [1990] on my bedroom dresser. Whilst at Glasgow University I pitched the story to the Film & TV faculty and, in winning the McTaggart Prize, secured a small amount of money to make it. It was shot on Super 8 film.

After a stretch concentrating on drawing comics, Road [1999] was my first foray into animating in the digital realm. I taught myself After Effects 3.0 so as to be able to make this animation. Acquiring that skill led to a long career working with design companies, post-production houses, and advertising agencies.

I've absolutely loved working with After Effects all these years. Along the way I picked up other animation software, notably Nuke, Maya, and Cinema 4D, but After Effects was my gateway to practicing animation as a paying job. That's kept bread on the table for twenty five years while I have, not just made a bunch of animations, but pontificated about music, set up a forum, spewed out a series of albums, and written some books.

The legendary creative director Paul Arden was a fan of Road and as result I was signed up as a director to his production, Arden Sutherland-Dodd.

Curry [2001] was a 3d animation about a Vampire buying a curry.
 

Nevertheless, in spite of providing my employment, I always nursed an ambition to bring my own little drawn world alive. Pussy is a Star [2002] was an attempt to achieve that. It was pitched to a cable TV channel as a pilot for a series called "Party Animals".

The film was the fruit of a year I spent studying traditional cel animation at St Martins Art School's London Animation Studios flicking sheets of paper by hand. I did the drawing here digitally though - directly into Toon Boom Studio with a Wacom Tablet. For many years I dreamed of becoming Old Street's answer to Matt Groening.

Methuselah [2009], which I made for the WOEBOT.tv series was, I thought, very beautiful. However, at once cute and uncomfortably obscene, I think it proved difficult to swallow.

Rave Bum [2012] was a pop video for one of the tracks off my album "Hallo".

Vitamin C [2016]

Vitamin C was the last animation I made purely for myself and not for work. If The Verucca Boy was my homage to Morph, Vitamin C was my tribute to John Ryan (the Pugwash sailors had a cameo). Both Ryan and Peter Firmin were acknowledged in the credits. The staging of the twenty-minute animation on a theatre set that was physically consistent was my attempt to ground the film in the same degree-zero-creativity that I also appreciate in stage plays. 

After Vitamin C – in part from a sense of failure – I stopped working on my own animations and concentrated on three books, "Retreat"[2020], "The "S" Word" [2022], and "The Garden" [2025]. I did keep my drawing hand "in" with the comic book "TPM" [2022].

Nanobanana and Google Photos

When running some tests with Nanobanana in ComfyUI I asked it to make a picture of a grey cat drinking from a hosepipe on a slate roof. This is because the grey cat asks me to turn the tap on for her every morning. What alarmed me were the slate roof tiles in the result. Obviously I can't prove it, but I'm reasonably certain that these have been scraped from the multiple pictures of my own garden roof terrace in Google Photos.

Google emphatically deny that they have trained their AI on Google Photos. They say, "We don't train any generative AI models outside of Google Photos with your personal data in Google Photos." However, the wording here FEELS slippery. The phrase "with your personal data" might imply that the photos could be "anonymised" - stripped of geographical information etc. Or perhaps when they have trained the models inside Google Photos they then take the models and use them elsewhere? That would also satisfy that wording. [Edit: Maybe because some of these pictures were on Sick Veg - a WordPress remotely hosted website - they were scraped from there?] 

They certainly leapt far ahead of the pack with Nanobanana and Veo, and it's tempting to conclude that they allowed themselves to train their models on Google Photos. I'm sure that if I went through the fine print I would find that by using this service (even though I have paid for it for years with Google Workspace...), I had surrendered my rights to this data for their purposes.

Certainly there's an irony to me posting this on Google's Blogger (the original Sick Veg blog posts were all on WordPress so that's not the leak). But I would argue that what one posts on Blogger and YouTube is by definition for public consumption. It's a very tiny drama, but one which is so personal to me that it feels like an infringement on what is sacred.

AI Cat.

Real cats.

Boosters, Traddies, and Geeks.

I've written twice about AI on my LinkedIn account and on both occasions I deleted the post. So this will be my third-time lucky.

In the first post I described getting a prompt to replicate the view across me as I sit at my desk. The shot on the left is a photo; on the right is my attempt to replicate it in AI. Just using a text prompt I didn't do badly – but the process did get exasperating... This sort of thing I've found is much easier to achieve within node-based programmes.

 

In the second post I talked about this short by Akos Papp which was the first AI film I actually enjoyed. I segued into a spiel about how I don't see AI as "a tool" (a now generic description of its offering) - but instead like hiring a massive team of robots. I gave a nod to the idea that an animator in post-production is as close to a robot as you get.

 

I deleted both posts because my feed at LinkedIn is already overflowing with people writing about AI. However, just for my own purposes, I thought I would revisit the topic one more time in the cooler environment of a blog-post and clarify my own thinking about what's happening and where things are headed.

New Forms

Lulu gave me a lesson on her sewing machine which I've borrowed.

I made two of these forms as pillows. Organic cotton. Organic wool stuffing.

A Mac Called Walden

 

I bought this Mac for £50 a couple of years ago from an architecture practice in Islington. It was acquired to help my son edit his skateboard videos on DV. I have my fully legal, permanent licenses of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects CS6 installed on it. Also installed are fully legal licenses of Final Cut Studio and Cinema 4D Studio. I made animations and videos for years with nothing more.

Bob Zero

Professor Robert Thurman

On Monday 3rd I followed up an invitation which came from Tibet House to attend a presentation at the House of Commons. Given by Professor Robert Thurman it was celebrating the life of the Dalai Lama, his friend and mentor since the early sixties.

In relation to my study of the counterculture, back in the USA from India in 1967, Thurman was present at Timothy Leary's LSD commune Millbrook. Renouncing his monk status for the purpose, he married the German-Swedish model and psychotherapist Nena von Schlebrügge, who was divorced from Leary. The couple are still together.

I have a copy of Jack Kerouac's "Wake Up" which Thurman authored an introduction to, and his translation of "The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti". Both were very useful in writing "Retreat" the former because it gives an educated Buddhist commentary for Kerouac's account of the life of The Buddha; the latter because it focuses on the sickness of Vimalakirti and the Buddhist response to illness. Before the start of the event I asked Thurman whether he would mind signing my copy of his book "Essential Tibetan Buddhism."

I'm a huge fan of Thurman's and so it was a big kick for me to meet him and be in his presence. Previously I had attended an online talk organised by Jeffrey Mishlove at which Jeffrey very sweetly introduced me to Thurman, and was able to ask a question about the counterculture. Thurman recommended that I read Curtis White's book "Transcendent", which I did, and when I met him on Monday was able to say that I done so.

I can't think of a more intoxicating speaker than "Bob" as he likes to be referred. Thurman is at once completely hilarious and entirely profound. At Mishlove's event, the carousel of laughter and nuttiness entirely derailed what I think Jeffrey was expecting was going to be a sincere discussion about Buddhism. And it was the same at the House of Commons, the room which was arranged by the Scottish MP Chris Law had apparently never been so full.

Inscription from 682-3 AD containing the first known zero.

The highlight for me was Thurman's discourse on zero - which he points out first appeared in Hindu mathematics before it was adopted by the Arabs. He'd evidently read the manuscript of William Dalrymple's book "The Golden Road", which he recommends, and he presented what is the most succinct and coherent description of the Buddhist conception of nothingness - Śūnyatā - that I've heard.

What NOTHING represents, Thurman said, was not a void, but INTERCONNECTEDNESS. Talk about light bulb moments! This enabled me to get my head around the concept better than anything else I've come across.

 This is how I articulated it in my own notes to myself:

ZERO as that plane of mutuality upon which all things rest. You subtract something from itself and what are you left with in its absence? Not NOTHING! The field of interrelations remains.

This led me to other thoughts about the nature of the number zero. When you add a 0 to 1 to create 10, 100, 1000 etc - you invoke the invisible architecture of the field of relations. The number zero is like scaffolding - not the edifice itself - but something which, without its presence, the edifice would not stand up.

The Razor's Edge

 

 

[Includes spoilers.] 

 

W. Somerset Maugham's "Razor's Edge" (1944) was referred to continually in my research for "Retreat". There was a lot of literature that wasn't explicitly about health which I had to avoid for the sake of focus. But in January 2019 I bought a copy; and it sat on my shelf for six years.

 

In the main I am a non-fiction reader. I'll enjoy some fiction, but as a rule I feel like I'm wasting time with it. There is a certain type of fiction, however, which transcends fantasy and ends up having a socio-historical effect. With "Retreat" the examples would be Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums", Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha", or Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Each of those three books defined a sensibility and a way of understanding the world.

 

How everyday philosophy and pop psychology are a hair's breadth away from fiction is epitomised by another book which I read, Carlos Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan". Purporting to be a documentary report of the author's interaction with a Yaqui shaman, it turned out to be completely made up. However, its effect on culture and people's lives was very real.

 

I would direct the reader to Maharshi scholar and disciple David Godman's excellent article for details on the interaction between the English Somerset Maugham and the Indian guru Ramana Maharshi. A number of Englishmen are mooted as being models for the character Larry Darrell who is so fascinated by vedic philosophy: Maharshi disciple Guy Hague, the author Christopher Isherwood, and (improbably) the scurrilous diarist Henry "Chips" Channon. Darrell is a composite. Yes, the Vedas and Buddhism came to America as early as Vivekananda's Chicago's 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions - but the English too were early adopters of these revolutionary ideas.

 

I'm so glad that I eventually read it! I thoroughly enjoyed it in a way I can't remember being so transfixed and delighted by a book since I picked up Philip K Dick's "Valis" in the nineties. I only wished I had read it sooner. In its remarkable way it sets the spiritual impulse of "the seeker" Larry Darrell against the background of affluent society. This lends perspective on both. Indeed for much of the book Larry is like a black hole at the writing's periphery. Arguably the novel works at its best that way, even if the commentary on the Vedas itself isn't too shabby. And as much as Larry is a great advertisement for the esoteric vedic values, it is the author Somerset Maugham, who plays himself as a character in the book, who holds all the cards.

 

Rather than using Larry's stringent high-mindedness to entirely undermine more obviously superficial characters like the mercurial Isabel or highfalutin' Elliot, Somerset Maugham sees them all as actors on a stage. A part of me came away thinking that Elliot, fixated upon the motion of high society, wasn't so ridiculous really - he had his own karma. Critically though, Larry is granted respect on an equal footing with those people obsessed with status and wealth, even if he has his own foibles (evangelically plotting to rescue Sophie), or blind spots (not acknowledging how his own wealth underwrites his spiritual journey). Certainly since the nineteen eighties, anyone on such a path has been eyed with fear, suspicion, and contempt - so it is both salutary and encouraging to read this powerful story.

 

It's a pity that both the movies made of "The Razor's Edge" are stodgy with wooden dialogue - but what can we expect? If you have read the book too, I'm very glad for us.