Channel Frederator Blog

Neil Sanders

Neil Sanders is an illustrator, teacher, designer, and animator from Melbourne, Australia. Here he shares a little about teaching animation, his uncontrollable sketching habit, and his dancing pup.

Channel Frederator: Where did you study animation?

Neil Sanders: I haven’t ever officially studied animation. I studied illustration in 1998-1999 at NMIT in Melbourne, Australia and have always been interested in animation. I studied at home and with friends, reading through at least a dozen books by various animation heroes, so much so that I’ve noticed from their books that Shamus Culhane and Richard Williams really didn’t like each other. Mostly I have learned by listening to people, trying things and seeing what works for me and what doesn’t.

After working and traveling for a couple of years, I returned to the institute to show my folio, which led to some sessional teaching. A few years ago I looked at my new timetable and was told I was going to be teaching animation. I’d done some animation before that, but with the challenge to teach it, I thought I’d better sharpen my skills first. I’ve been working for a couple of years at improving my skills to further teach my students and I’m finding now that this is my art form of choice.

Now I can’t draw a still image now without thinking about movement. It’s as though my characters are running around in my head, and I have to shoot them with a tranquilizer dart in order to slow them down and draw them.

CF: Who or what has inspired your work the most?

NS: I don’t know what my work is inspired by… I suppose it’s inspired by a “wasted” youth of cartoons and a want to create something new that I haven’t seen anywhere else before, I don’t know if I ever will though.

I’ve always been one of those guys who would draw in class all the time, and now it’s kind of starting to get out of control. I’m doing it when I go out for dinner, when I’m watching a band, in meetings at work, on the train, when I wake up with an idea in the middle of the night, while riding my bike… well not then but you get the idea.

So the “Sketchy Friends Dance” animation came about simply because I’ve been drawing all these crazy characters for a while and decided I wanted to see what they’d look like moving around. I didn’t want to spend time developing a story or personality for them, so I found a music track with lots of bloopey bleepey sounds and animated them as though they were dancing around and making the sounds with the music, which is “National Zombie Attack” by Tarteviant.

CF: Do you prefer one medium over another (hand drawn 2D over Flash or Maya, Toonboom, etc)?

NS: I’m a 2D guy, but only because I find it the most immediate and flexible for me to completely change a characters physiology.

CF: Do you have any cool projects coming up that you can tell us about?

NS: I’m planning on fleshing out the personalities and weaving some sort of a story out of the sketchy friends characters.

CF: What gets you dancing?

NS: My dog Gary when he wants his dinner. We have a ritual “dinner dance” together every night. It’s kind of a cross between a soft shoe shuffle and running across hot sand at the beach.

Thanks, Neil!

You can check out Neil’s animation “Sketchy Friends Dance” right here in Episode 166 of Channel Frederator!

– Bailee DesRocher