Visiting Professional: Fraser Maclean

We were visited by the animation layout artist Fraser Maclean. The experience was incredibly rewarding and insightful. Without my realisation, Maclean had written the book Setting the Scene.

The book is all about layout art in animation and is incredibly informative about staging in animation. Fraser worked on storyboards on the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I found this part of his career particularly fascinating because it was only up till recently, I believed the animation in that film was created in 3D. When in actual fact, all the animation was created in 2D and then the shadows were individually painted on cells. This sounded like an unbelievably painstaking process but to me I feel entirely worth it. His work on that film may be viewed as a very small part of the film, yet is still a necessary part of which added to the quality of the film.

His outlook on his career and that of animation in general I found to be incredibly enlightening. He said that his contribution to the animation industry will be remembered as but 'a drop in the ocean' and yet he is incredibly satisfied with that. I got the impression from the way he was talking to us that he does not have the desire to be at the front of a project like Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He is happy to be a cog in the machine. This inspired me because I felt like this is basically what I want my work in the animation industry to be like. There was a time where I wanted to direct animated films, and a small part of me probably would like to still do that. But now that aspiration has faded slightly and if I would direct anything I would want it to be on a far smaller scale. That idea of being part of something bigger has recently sounded more and more appealing. 

Fraser's career path also appealed to me because I just generally really liked the work he created on films such as Tarzan and Space Jam of which was a part of my childhood and an inspiration for taking an interest in animation.

I even really like the work he's created on smaller commercial projects, an example of this being the Weetabix bullets commercial. The character designs were incredible and visually the advert was very impressive. I admired how Fraser talked up commercial work. It was like experiencing a wake up call. I have never really been that open to commercial work, often associating it with 'selling out' but after studying animation for the past three years I now understand how big apart Capitalism is of animation and how necessary an evil it is. Studios produce commercial work so they can then make their passion projects.