Justin P. Lees Visits the Cosgrove Hall Film Archive
In September the archive welcomed Justin P. Lees who has been working on an animation project with James Pollit and the team at Venture Arts in Manchester. In his personal animation project Justin had been experimenting with ways to combine his drawn characters with backgrounds. With this in mind we looked at background art and cels to show how these different styles could be combined - over to Justin!
We went to the Cosgrove Hall Film Archive to see real life work that was seen on T. V. Cosgrove Hall was very famous for its animation. It was in Chorlton where I used to live. I wanted to see the professional work from Cosgrove Hall to inspire my own work - I have been working on my own movie trailer!
Justin during his visit holding up a background from Foxbusters
Cosgrove Hall Film Archive is at Waterside in Sale Town. Rosy took us downstairs to the meeting room to look behind the scenes. Rosy had collected backgrounds, cels and storyboards that she chose just for me.
I saw lots of things at the Archive; I looked at the old storyboards from Cosgrove Hall production series like Engie Benjy. A storyboard is drawn BEFORE the animation. It’s used for planning. Underneath the storyboards, are the storyline, directions and notes for the animator.
I saw some a character sheets, which show the style of the character, the size and the proportions. This helps a lot of different animators that animated the same character and style.
Justin studying a storyboard from Engie Benjy
I saw the old backgrounds and cells from all Cosgrove Hall productions like The Foxbusters and Avenger Penguins. They were all made by hand, using water coloured paint, acrylic paint and some used computer paint.
The backgrounds were different to the characters because the characters are brighter than the backgrounds and painted on plastic. The characters have an outline and the background is all painty. But when an object is moving this means they’re not part of the background. And they share the same style as the characters.
Justin discovers the scene from Adventure Penguins
I used my phone to find the matching background and cell on YouTube videos from Avenger Penguins and Foxbusters - Rosy was happy to see them in the REAL animation!