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Biography

Simon Hall has had a passion for creating clay for many years.  This started in the days before web cams, free capture software and the internet.  “In those days you had to have a Cine camera and process the film. As I couldn’t afford that most of my early animations were never recorded. It was only more recently that animating became more accessible.  I was fascinated by the Lego animations but at the time the resolution and cameras were not quite what I wanted.”

Hall was inspired by the madness of Bruce Bickford and particularly Bruce’s interaction with Frank Zappa. “I have been a Zappa fan for many years but it was only really after his death I discovered his music. That’s also when I stumbled upon Zappa and Bickford’s collaboration on Babysnakes.”  

Babysnakes was the 1978 video that featured Zappa’s mad stage antics with Bickford’s unique, complex and slightly disturbing clay animations.
“Babysnakes opened my eyes to what you could do in clay, Bruce’s attention to detail was on a scale I could only aspire to.”

This prompted the first clay animation, shot with a $8 webcam (on an old Pentium 1100Mhz) using the freeware Monkey Jam and edited in Windows Movie Maker!  ‘Babysnakes 2009’ – attribute to Frank and Bruce, went worldwide in early 2009 counting up 1000’s of plays on YouTube.

“Unfortunately I had to remove Zappa’s original soundtrack after a legal challenge, which was sad. If anything I felt I was publicising Zappa’s work to a new audience.”

The video still remains, but the audio now contains director’s commentary instead of the original soundtrack.  “It’s such a shame as so many of the parts of my animation matched up with Frank’s lyrics." Despite the missing soundtrack the tributes to Bruce and Frank remain to be littered throughout the animation.

It was after Babysnakes release that Hall was approached by Chris Bright aka Trash. “Trash was keen to collaborate on a project; he had a song called Pink Taco he wanted animated.”  The song was only 1 minute 30 seconds, but it took over 2 months to animate. “I used a frame rate of 24 frames per second, which is what normal TV and films are shot in. In hindsight this was too high and for my next video I would drop to 16 FPS. This still looks smooth but will shorten the time needed in production.”

The project currently under construction is Snail Trails – it’s top secret!