On Thursday, February 29th, award winning Welsh animator and director Joanna Quinn and producer and writer Les Mills visited Stockton to present a master class on animation.

Both artists come from a background of fine arts. Quinn has a B.A. in graphic design, and Mills received a masters degree in the fine arts and art history from Rutgers University. They met when Mills was a professor teaching Quinn in a drawing class, where he described her as having the “best life drawing [he’d] ever seen from someone [he’d] taught.”

Their first collaboration was on a short film titled “Girls Night Out” which depicted the story of three female factory workers on an outing to see a male stripper. Since then, their work has won many awards, including Emmys, a Bafta, as well as securing them an Oscar nomination.

Quinn described how her animation journey actually began with comic strips, as the only animation she was familiar with was that in the style of Disney, which did not suit her interest. Her goal was to make something “beautifully drawn, rather than simplified and cartoony”. She wanted to portray her own humor as well. She would then convert her comic work into her first animated short film.

She went on to explain how she loved depicting movement and the way that it took a lot of drawing to complete, 12 frames per second of animation to be exact. The animation process consisted of drawing the “key frames” or key moments first, then filling in the gaps with the movement. “The key frames are where the beats are,” Quinn explained, then she described how the eyes of the viewer fill in the rest with the other frames in between, which allows for the drawings to appear to be moving. She displayed some of her drawings, which when flipped through created the sequences that made up scenes. The drawings were hand painted on cel material. 

Their work often centered around strong women, and the characters in her films were typically inspired by real people. Mills and Quinn both explained how this allowed for the audience to identify with the characters portrayed on the screen, “they are based in reality, so people can identify with the characters.” A recurring character in their work, Beryl, is a factory worker, and both Mills and Quinn have experience working in a factory. They are no strangers to doing on-site research for projects, as they often did to gain a better understanding of what something should look like. Even though the final project would be stylized, it still maintained an authenticity to the source material.

The pair also described their experiences working to create for outside companies, such as their work with Charmin on their bear character campaigns. Their advice to young artists who pursue work such as this, is to stay small for as long as possible, only growing naturally to avoid working simply to pay off rent for a studio rather than due to passion for the art.