[LECTURE] Lecture 4 - Pete Bishop

Pete Bishop is an animation director, designer and part time lecturer at UCLan and Royal College of Arts in London. He has worked at Passion Pictures for several years and founded the Film Garage based in London, he currently works from his studio in London where he directs animation. Pete never attended Art School, he actually studied Law, but he always drew. He began to attend evening classes in Brixton where he did his first animation commission in the 1980s, a commercial for Time Out. This commercial had no dialogue, but featured stop-motion robots and abstract frame-by-frame sequences. After explaining about this commission he expressed his views on how he works as an animator by stating; “Animation is a collaborative art form”. He will often work in small teams on his projects, a name that came up a lot was Steve Appleby who he works collaboratively with.

A lot of Pete Bishop’s work came from his experiments, how he said he works is; He has to draw to think, even though the drawings he produces are rough it’s where his inspiration comes from, he doesn’t consider himself good at form. After working on the commission for Time Out, he worked on many different projects; he created a couple of MTV openings, the Sci-fi channel Idents and worked on a few Turnpike Films as well. Pete then began to explain a series he directed, edited and co-wrote with Steve called How to Destroy the World in 2008. He was given a budget to create three short animations about how humans are destroying the world, however inadvertently made four short animations, blowing most of the budget. 

After explaining about How to Destroy the World, he then explained about the script he pitched for a Sanatogen advert, resulting him in getting a job for Passion Pictures. After a while he then was asked to create an animation which was to promote the Holland Animation Film Festival in 2008, Pete had previously entered and won numerous awards at this festival for his animations such as ‘How to Destroy the World’, ‘Mister Fister 2’ ‘Theatre of the Hands’. The film he presented to them was a recreation of an old recording of a bird he took years ago, him and Lee Wilson Wolfe edited and submitted it to the festival, in 2010, the short actually won the Broadcast Design at Brit Animation Awards. 

I wont delve too much into what else was said here, but I will explain how I have been influenced by his work during my research assignment at a later date.