Tim Staffell Newsletter

[Q-Freddie]

1982: Cool Clear Water...
All day I faced the barren waste.....
Tim Staffell
Oct 13

Liberation Days…
Once I had truly settled into my new career as a Film & TV Modelmaker and Artist, I began to relish the work. It was everything that the music business wasn’t. I’d always felt, privately that the fundamental criteria of producing saleable music had been not that the music was particularly good, but that you could persuade someone with resources that it was; PR and promotion would do the rest. (It’s still a prevalence in my view - presentation is everything). What distinguished my new career was that the created product could not, generally be defined as a matter of opinion. It was always, initially the subject of a brief, and as such could only be right or wrong within the context it was intended for. It was a fantastically liberating feeling. During the first workshop I had a space in, I absorbed an awful lot of new techniques, I learned better how to sculpt, mould and cast in different materials, use bench machinery which I had never dealt with previously - brushed up on (and in many cases, realised) how to measure accurately, finish and refine surfaces, polish, groove, slot, cut, turn on a lathe, use a milling machine, a spray gun - apply paint and texture effects to surfaces.. it was a mind-bogglingly creative time of experimentation and revelation..

What was particularly stimulating about the experience is that it was feeding a commercial industry that was increasingly hungry for visual novelty. In that respect we were being asked to simulate and create all kinds of cinematic legerdemain in the service of retail branding and movie fantasy. The UK SFX Industry had been cutting its teeth on shows like Thunderbirds for a decade or more, and there was a wealth of experience and techniques that had developed from sources such as the studios of Gerry Anderson and Ray Harryhausen. I’d been working on ‘jobbing’ projects for a couple of years when the opportunity came to work on a project at Clearwater Films, a three-studio complex with their own workshops, camera equipment, and lighting gear over the river at Battersea. They were, at that time, the premier stop-motion animation house in the UK, with a team of superb animator/modelmakers - and their reputation was growing such that they needed to recruit to keep up with the increasing workload.

The Best Job in The World…?
My time at Clearwater constituted a rich and varied experience that further cemented my skills as a modelmaker, and intriduced me to the art of stop-motion animation. Although Clearwater primarily had a reputation based on its amazing stop-motion output, the core of the production team had come from the studios of Gerry Anderson, and their work with miniatures and effects was of the highest standard. For a couple of years the team of in-house modelmakers worked full-on, on a series of innivatively written commercial films; there were (eventually), three studios working flat out. The list of ‘Above The Line’ (Top Brands) commercials read like a catalogue of household-name products - Lego, Cadburys, BirdsEye, Hersheys, London Docklands, Hartleys Jam, Armstrong Floors, Presto Supermarkets.. etc etc. The one common factor to all of these was that the scripts all required some spectacular use of effects, (filmed and post-produced) to achieve stunning results. We pulled off some pretty astonishing feats in those days, establishing the reputation of the the studios in the process..

The Trainset generation…
All through the fifties, when Christmas rolled around, and my folks would face the annual dilemma of what to buy the pre-teen boys, there was a reasonable possibility that a toy would be railway-related. Consequently I became the recipient of tin trains, later, small electric sets, maybe a train guard’s uniform… you get the picture. I’m pretty sure that on several occasions I found a little book from Awdry’s original railway series, and I had grown up with the vaguely nostalgic memory of the little steam-engines with their silly faces and petty operational problems. And now I suddenly found myself elected to be supervising modelmaker on the development of the stories for TV. It didn’t, of course indicate that I was a particularly skilled modlemaker - in fact, I’d say that 75% of the team were far more skilled than I - but I must have been seen as a decent co-ordinator, and I WAS a fair sculptor, so I got to make a lot of the original faces, the small (and large-scale) human figures, and engage with research, procurement of rolling stock, landscaping, backgrounds, and peripheral things like smoke effects. I suppose for the first series, it was about eighteen months in the making, from initial pilot episode to completion. I wasn’t party to the logistics of the actual filming, but we had a tight schedule to build all of the set-pieces that would furnish the model locations for the storyboarded episodes.

Out of all proportions….
I’m not sure that any of us involved in the actual build, had an inkling of how significant ‘Thomas And Friends’ would become; but on reflection I think it does have something to do with the care that went into its development and construction. In the event, Clearwater Films would not have a particularly extended life as a company - I was remote from management, so didn’t have much of an idea of how it was being run. In retrospect, any revenue generated by the series seems not to have found its way back as working capital. There were political struggles, jealousies, recriminations that I was on the sidelines of, such that an offer I had once filming had started - to join Red Baloon Films in Central London as Art Director, came as a blessed, and welcome relief. By this time, I had begun to dabble in animating simple scenes, and I would soon become much more closely involved in the filming process…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2nL5sSSvd0

Gordon & Thomas from the first series of Thomas The Tank Engine
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz… The Vogon Captain -BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide….