“Our newest guy used to be an experienced film designer. Errol Le Cain only started animating a year ago, but he was so good potentially that we all worked with him over the first stages. And now he’s getting really hot. Errol is working on a children’s film; Sailor and the Devil. He is doing everything, so he’s getting ten years’ experience in one, and we get a film.”
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“It’s a waxy pencil and you had to sharpen it by hand. In fact, in the summer, you had to put them in the fridge, otherwise they were melting. And getting really fine lines on cel, it was all done on cel... they perfected that. My God, it was good... and people said to Dick, 'Oh, it’ll melt under the camera'. And Dick found, to the contrary, the camera heat actually made it harden.”
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“The last stage of making an animated film is shooting it. It looks like some sort of weird religious ritual. You have a small room with the walls painted solid black to kill any reflections on the acetate sheets. You have just a single cameraman, bending reverently over the animation table and you have the camera mounted directly overhead, staring down with a glass eye. You start with the background—black in this case—then the acetate cels go on top of this. The background shows through the cels where they’re not painted. With each action on a different level, you can control them all separately. Then the cameraman pushes the button and the camera shoots one frame; 1/24th of a second. And then he does the whole thing over again with the next stage of the movie; lay the cels, push the button, shoot one frame, remove the cels, and so on... for three days working from nine ‘til five, he performs this ritual. The result is one minute of completed animation.”
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“The Sailor and the Devil is a Dick Williams production and the style is similar to Williams’ other films. The sailor with a grin a mile wide, sails against dazzling patterns of waves and there is a roaring modern folk song to accompany the visuals.”
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“The film is a very stylized piece, animated in a very liquid and fluid fashion, all on ones. The backgrounds are predominantly black with large expanses of sea always in motion. Having this artist do much of the film, himself, was how Dick felt would be the best way to teach him animation. In fact, it is a good way, but one doesn’t expect such films to be this exceptional.”
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“Le Cain invents an idiosyncratic style of movement that combines jittery bursts of motion with visually pleasing dance cycles. When the storm arrives in the film or the skeleton wave threatens to overwhelm the sailor, we encounter a world of pure graphic art. Le Cain uses the full range of color, movement, design, and cinematic devices to create an exciting universe that could exist nowhere but in an animated film.”
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Special thanks:
Animation Magazine • ArchivistMemes • Karl Gipson • Clive Noakes • Davide Simonetti • Frederika Le Cain • Lisa Bradford • Robert Wyn • Technicolor Physical Assets Team • The British Film Institute • The Richard Williams Estate • TheThiefArchive |