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 The Verucca 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 company, Arden Sutherland-Dodd.

Made with Lightwave, Curry [2001] was a 3d animation about a Vampire buying a curry. I'd completely forgotten about this one.
 

In spite of animation providing me with employment, I always nursed an ambition to bring my own 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 RETAS 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. Made in Toon Boom Studio.

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 its 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.