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I am highlighting some areas of work that I have done in the past. I have not included other or smaller jobs, that also involved craft work, mold making and some model making. Most of the work I did was as a freelancer  or subcontracted work, and therefore, you will not usually see a screen credit for some of the work I did.  Only some of the projects I worked on are listed at
In the late 1Gumby980's I worked as a Stop-Motion animator of the original Clay Icon, Gumby, for American television. This character, created by Art Clokey now seems so innLionel I. Orozco on the set, animatingocent but still endures. There are quite extensive listings on the internet, just on Gumby ! Looking back now, what an awesome opportunity....Lionel I. Orozco with Gumby & Pokey learning to Stop-Motion animate on the job! I will never forget those 10 second animation quotas per day (from each animator, shooting on two's). The picture on the left, many years later and I am older but Gumby & Pokey have not aged at all! Some great animators came from those Gumby beginnings....Karen Kiser is now a top CG animator at Pixar ....Mike Belzer, Steve Buckley, Angie Glocka, Tim Hittle, Owen Klatte, Eric Leighton, Anthony Scott, and Trey Thomas are Nightmare Before Christmas alumni, and have also gone into computer animation. A few have returned to Stop Motion but I hope that they will all, someday, "come home" to their Stop Motion Animation roots.
 
After that, I did some B-movie work, and one movie that we all might have forgotten about, The Chilling, starring Linda Blair, Dan "Grizzly Adams" Haggerty, and Troy Donahue ! I also met them all, in person! Linda Blair was really cool. She starred in The Exorcist, which is now a classic and one of my most favorite movies. Low, low, budget and I do not think the film broke any box office record. I was primarily an assistant, mold maker, and helping with fabrication of the latex Zombie masks & appliances. I also fabricated miniature Cryo-Chambers for a high-speed explosion special effects shot and I designed a rig where a zombie / stunt person appears to be skewered by a forklift blade. The businessman, who owned a company that manufactured cellular antenna towers, decided to try his hand at making movies....he wrote, produced & directed The Chilling. I think it was a very expensive hobby for him!
 
In this venture I got a chance to 'taste' the corporate world of Media Communications. Unlike the ubiquitous commercials on television, the public usually never sees these advertisement-like pieces. Anyway, the project required over 30 seconds of clay animation for Amdahl Corporation (in Silicon Valley); about their contributional support of United Way. They had a producer, writer / director & an art director, and I was the 'technician', who created the miniature sets, the finished animateable clay puppets (about 10), then using my workhorse Bolex; the marathon animation and the entire job, took only about 2 weeks ! It was very rushed & the animation not so finessed. Then another job for Tandem Computers, basically fabricating a large muppet-type character used for their in-house weekly TV shows for their employees.
 
Then, my big-time shot into Stop-Motion (well, sort of); I was hired by Skellington productions as a freelancer to fabricate a large number of animation armatures for the secondary -background puppet characters for The Nightmare Before Christmas. This mass production of armatures was really going to be an acid test of all my previous secretive experimentations of armature making. I used alternative fabrication methods that did not require the use of a machining mill or lathe. At that time, I mostly used, just a drill press! Well, I found out really fast that I still had a little more to learn and the Nightmare work exposed some weaknesses of my armatures, but this "trial by fire" situation accelerated my knowledge in designing and fabricating very strong, basic & functional animation armatures. To this day, my animation armature fabrication methods use only minimal & basic machining (not overly complex machine work) but they are very precision made and function just as good as fully machined "bells & whistles" armatures. Also on Nightmare, I had the opportunity to do some animation assisting; mostly technical stop motion, like animating opening gates, the funeral wagon car, the background traveling elements, etc..
 
While I was finishing up on Nightmare, I got a call from Tippett Studios to fabricate basic ball & socket armatures, for "poseable puppets", of the main dinosaurs for the now legendary breakthrough CGI movie Jurassic Park. The armatures I made for Phil were fully realized into finished foam and painted puppets, but were never used for animation purposes. I got to meet the Stop-Motion Puppet Meister....the Main Dude....Phil Tippett ! What I like about Phil, is that he comes from a Stop-Motion background and fully understands & appreciates the tactile nature of the puppet animation art; you have got to Feel the animation movements within your body. He used these articulated puppets as a visual aid to guide the computer animators at Industrial Light & Magic, to experience and feel the sensory, hands-on method of positioning the puppets into dynamic poses.
 

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