Barry Pilling is a freelance director and animator, whose previous work includes commissions for the BBC, Polydor Records and Mutate Britain as well as lots of low/no budget music videos and short films. We grabbed him for a chat to find out what it takes to make it from plasticine in your bedroom to mash-ups for the BBC.

What do you do?

I’m an animator, so basically I take inanimate objects or drawings and bring them to life in a video. The upside is that I find it a really creative way of making a film, because you can let your imagination run riot. The constraints of reality really don’t matter. The downside is that it takes a long time and requires pictures… so many pictures.

How exactly do you do it?

Here comes the science bit… One second of film is actually made up of 25 still images (AKA frames). By playing these frames rapidly one after the other it makes it look as though the image is moving. So to animate, I find it’s important to think in these terms… I’m building a film one frame at a time. Mainly I do this using still photos, taken one after another. Import them into video editing software and make each photograph one frame long and voila, you’ve got a film. The other option is to use a video camera and clip stills out of the footage, which is something I did a lot more in my earlier films. This meant I could mix animation and sped up video together, which made things a lot easier.

How did you get into stop motion?

Honestly, it’s a combination of an over-active imagination and an inability to go to bed early. As a teenager I’d stay up late working on an idea and get frustrated that I couldn’t just started making it straight away. I had to find props and locations, rope my friends into being in the crew, find someone who could act… sod that. With animation I could be as creative as possible without needing money or outside help, and the films came out looking relatively good, so that was me hooked.

What do you enjoy about it most?

I love being immersed in something, giving it all my time and energy. When I’m animating it’s just me, the camera and my ideas and I find that so exciting. You go into a kind of hibernation, crafting this thing… and no-one can see how it’s going to turn out. That is exciting right, I’m not just really weird? There’s also the breakthroughs you pull off as you get better, e.g. last year I worked out a technique for lip-syncing [SEE ABOVE VIDEO - I LUST YOU] and this year I did my first viral for the BBC [BELOW]. You can really feel your improvement as it happens.

Do you have any hilarious stop-motion related anecdotes?

No anecdotes as such as it’s a pretty solitary process, but it is fun looking at what you can use around you to put into a film. String becomes rope for a tiny man, cotton wool becomes smoke from a cannon and an exploding banana looks great on camera.

Who are your 3 favourite animators?

- Nick Park and his company Aardman Animation
Aardman are so inventive and so damn British, I love it. I’ll list some of their back catalogue here so you can see how awesome these guys are… Morph, Creature Comforts, Rex the Runt, Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, Angry Kid, Robbie the Reindeer, Shaun the Sheep and the video for Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel. One of the best videos OF ALL TIME. They’re just animation royalty.

- Dice Productions
I recently met some fantastic Birmingham-based animators called Dice Productions. These guys are the shizz. They made a short film called Man in a Cat. it’s about a fat, balding man who lives inside a cat, and is just as brilliant as it sounds. It’s recently been commissioned by the UK Film Council and I can’t wait to see what comes of it. Keep an eye on these guys. http://diceproductions.blogspot.com/2010/04/man-in-cat-is-commissioned.html

- Stephen Spielberg
Ok, so he’s not an animator, so why am I listing him? Well, he’s everything I love about films… Imaginative, ambitious and has an ability to take you to another world, whether that’s Jurassic Park or Peter pan’s Island in Hook, he can bring things to life. That’s, I think, what animation is all about. Oh, and anyone who says having mass appeal is a bad thing is just a snob. Go Spielberg!

And finally, what advice can you give to animation newbies?

The best advice I can give is to just get on with it! You’ll soon realise how easy and addictive it can be. If you’ve got a digital camera pick it up and take a picture of something. Move it a bit, then take another. Move it again, then take another. Do this a bunch of times and flick back through the pics. You’ve made an animation! Easy. Freakin. Peasy.

Also, don’t get hung up on what you’re taking the pics with. I’ve made films using all kinds of junk, including my phone a couple of years ago:

The main thing is having a great idea. Having said that, if you want to shoot high def but can’t afford HD video kit, a good stills camera will spit the pics out at a high enough resolution that it’s classed as HD.

…Oh, and eat pasties. They’re good for the creative process. FACT.

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