Harry Tennant, static and motion...

We’ve known Harry Tennant since he was studying art at Falmouth. Every time he put a picture out into the world he just got better and better so we nabbed him before anyone else did! But having carved out his career as an illustrator he evidently needed a new challenge and set about training himself as an animator, creating a motion reel that beautifully compliments his static folio.

We asked him to look back at the transformative process.

“It's strange in that I’ve always loved animation, but having decided to be an illustrator at university that was quite a singular ambition and veering into animating had never entered my mind.

Serendipitously, my flatmate at the time was getting rid of some books, one of them being Richard Williams' The Animators Survival Guide. I think I had a few weeks between projects and just thought I’d go through it and try the exercises. Seeing this book reminded me of all the classic animation I’ve seen and loved. One of my favorite films is Belleville Rendezvous, I love how grotuesque the whole style is but somehow so refined and elegant too.

It was exciting to be back to square one with something creative and have so much to learn. I went through the book cover to cover, drawing out the excercises of walk cycles. It’s similar to printmaking in that you really need to learn all the basics so comprehensively, and requires so much attention to detail, but after this it’s a lot of fun to put all the pieces together and see what the results are.

I suppose it reminded me of fun stuff like making little flip book animations at school when I was supposed to be paying attention to something else. Now that I was actually able to draw well it opened up so many possibilities creatively.

Perhaps because I spent so many years drawing and illustrating and printmaking, that whenever I see an animation come together it’s so exciting, it feels like some kind of illusion (which I suppose it is!) and when I see the results it always somehow surprises me which is a lot of fun.

I also found the printmaking style I’d trained in had so much interesting cross over with animation, it’s all in the careful preparation. Most of the animation I do now is in After Effects, and while it’s amazing for such a range of types of animation and effects, mostly what I use it for is recreating the most basic analogue forms of animation, like stop motion.

Once I’d got in the swing with animation and started taking on projects here and there, I learned so much about illustration from it. At the beginning every illustration I made I would have a go at animating it but soon found that with a lot of illustration it’s strength is in the stillness of it and that there’s so much left to the imagination. Now I see what is clearly AI use with people adding little elements of motion to static work and I think “is that really making it better or more interesting?”. So much of what we see in the media and on our phones is in motion, and my recent work has helped me see where and when it really works to have something stand still.

Recently I’ve worked on many commissions where I’ve initially been bought on as an illustrator and ended up producing animation for the client too, or vice versa. It’s so useful to be able to do both, letting me show clients through ideas and how they might work in motion or in any other context."

More excellent art from Harry here.

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