Visiting professional Fraser McLean

Fraser McLean is an animation practitioner running the Animation Centrifuge.
He started off the talk of showing a short out of Who Framed Rodger the Rabbit.
When he was in school he was the only one who moved on to an artistic career because a lot of his peers were discouraged by their parents.
He was lucky enough to go to a school that encouraged art and took it very seriously. He talked about how there is two types of money - clean and dirty, also what it's like working for commercial purposes. He said the three things that are most important are creativity, technology and unfortunately cash, how ever undignified it might seem, but making adverts pays the rent. The best animation is collaborative. As a child MacLean had a chance to cultural events like ballet, Japanese puppet theatre, mimes. His parents were very supportive of him being interested in art. He was fascinated by animation on tv but he didn't have a chance to see Disney. The first time he saw a Disney he was motivated to draw. At his time animation was something clever people did on the other side of the world. Moreover nobody used the planes so travelling somewhere far away was something unbelievable. The reason MacLean teaches art history is because we are going to be the history. And learning from people before us helps us be better. He talked about the painting "an old woman cooking eggs" by diego velazques. He talked very passionately how the settings of the painting is almost alive. There is something really haunting going on the scene, basically he was really influenced by this painting. Drawing is a way of practice, basically he drew all sort of observational stuff, his drawings were really amazing. He we very inspirational when he talked about practicing and getting better at what you like. The drawings his tutors hated, were the drawings that got him hored at disney. He said that the movie industry is a little bit of creativity and a lot of organisation and discipline. You need creativity as the driving force but most of the execution is about problem solving. Then he talked about being a sound effects producer on a movie and how he moved on to Disney and worked on Who Framed Rodger the Rabbit, how complex it was to do levels of shading that would match up with the live action footage.
Overall Fraser McLeans talk was extremely inspiring. It was refreshing to see a professional practitioner so enthusiastic about what he's been doing for years as well as providing so much insight into the industry.