Animator visit: Fraiser Mclean

Fraiser Mclean came in to give a talk about he got into the industry and managed to be the main animator of many live action animations such as Roger rabbit, Space Jam and Ducktails the movie. which I grew up with not knowing who animated the characters of each of these films when he mentioned how he got the job I was amazed.

He explained his experience in life showcasing the difficulties he had to go through, one of his experiences involves his artwork from a young age. He entered a course for fine art and was able to create drawings that should deserve awards at his age and time, but unfortunately, this was not what his teacher wanted to see and being told over and over that his work was not up to par gave him the motivation to do better and study how to improve his observational skills which he presented through the presentation.

As he got better he wanted to apply for an art job, and found the job of an inbetweener and signed up for it, he got accepted and was assigned to work with another guy to make the inbetweens of a scene. He said that they both spent a week not understanding what they had to do, that he'd look at the sheet of paper and just left it. after the first week, one of the AD's came to check up on them and found them with nothing, and because of this had to teach them how to do their job.

As he eventually learned how to create the inbetweens and eventually this lead to him being able to work on many films which I've mentioned above. He also explained the process of how he did live action animations, and how difficult it was back then compared to now because of the advancements of technology.

one example is Tarzan where he had to animate Tarzan riding down the tree within a 3D space, back then the 3D software was terrible and was still being created. it took them a long time to construct a scene but they had ways of going about it to slightly increase the process by directly colouring the 3D objects which I can't really explain but understood from what he was talking about.

Another example is the live action mixed with animation in Roger Rabbit and Space Jam, the process was as difficult as the example above about Tarzan because they had to animate on top of the recorded footage and be able to keep it smooth by this I mean that the characters were all animated in 2D and had a bit CG effects to make it stand out and feel apart of the scene. which really seems like a difficult task back then compared to what we can do nowadays.