Guest speaker, Artist Owen Thomas visited staff and students from Creative Industries, bringing with him some of the elements he has crafted in the making of his fascinating and beautifully rendered stop-frame animations. These are based on his observations and audio recordings of suburban life, specifically, sanitation workers.
Owen’s eye and ear for detail brings his home-made 8fps animations to life in the time-honoured way that existed before CGI and digital effects cast this technique into the nostalgic past (oldies, think The Clangers, Trumpton, The Magic Roundabout, Bagpuss et al). But there is something both personal and universal about Owen’s work which draws on this art form, putting him at the age of 19 in the same hallowed category as Oliver Postgate and the Aardman studio, makers of the world famous Wallace and Grommit films.
In person, Owen was open and relaxed, and enjoyed taking questions. His calm delight in explaining how he had created and animated bin lorries, trees and flying birds as well as the movement and body language of the manual workers he was studying, added to his wonderful imagination and his understanding of his techniques made his presence at Carshalton college surprising, interesting and inspiring.
In a broader sense, his animations capture these everyday moments which otherwise go unremarked and which belong in the category of the social documentation of working class mundane lives, which (let us not forget) Orwell and other far-sighted writers and thinkers in the 1930s inhabited to record, in this way contributing hugely to our social history.
Dean Whitbread, Tutor said: "Utterly brilliant, modest and aware, clearly a young man who has found his forte at a relatively young age, I sincerely hope Owen comes back, perhaps to study. He would be an asset to the college."
