Bruce Bickford (animator)

Bruce Bickford (born in Seattle, February 11, 1947[1]) is a maker of animated films who works primarily in clay animation. From 1974 to 1980 he collaborated with Frank Zappa. Bickford's animation was featured extensively in the Frank Zappa videos Baby Snakes and The Dub Room Special. Zappa also released a video titled The Amazing Mr. Bickford, which was entirely composed of Bickford animations set to a soundtrack of Zappa's orchestral music.

Bickford's animations depict surreal scenes based on his unique worldview. Often outwardly seeming to be somewhat disconnected from the world around him, Bruce Bickford's work is extremely subjective in its content and concepts, making for some disturbing and shocking imagery. Much of his video work depicted fast-moving, fluid-like transformations of human figures and disfigured faces into odd beasts on surreal structural settings with impressive camera effects (moving around within his stop-motion animation).

His life and work were featured in the 2004 biographical documentary film Monster Road, directed by Brett Ingram, which has won numerous film festival awards and garnered acclaim in many countries.

In 2006, he was working on Boar's Head/Whore's Bed (line animation, 4500+ frames and counting), Tales of the Green River and Castle 2001, a feature-length film which is animated using 3D shapes made out of bits of paper.

A DVD was released by Bright Eye Pictures in early 2008 including the first film that Bickford had complete control over, the 28-minute Prometheus' Garden, originally completed on 16mm film in 1988. The DVD also features Luck of a Foghorn, a new 30-minute documentary about Bickford by the director of Monster Road.

Mr. Bickford was the first ever guest to appear on the internet radio show Pussyfoot.

In 2015, Bickford was working on a 500+ page graphic novel titled Vampire Picnic, which he is hoping to publish with Fantagraphics.[2][3][4]

On September 1, 2015, Bickford's new animated feature Cas'l was released on DVD.[5][6] Most of the original animating had been done from 1988-1997.[7] The film (or earlier versions of it) had previously been shown at various film festivals from 2008 onwards with live musical accompaniment, as a final soundtrack was not yet made.[8][9][10][11]

Filmography

References

  1. ↑ historylink.org 2016-04-02
  2. ↑ Bruce Bickford Vs. Time. 2015-01-03
  3. ↑ A GIF Comic Tour of Bruce Bickford's Magical Home Animation Studio in SeaTac, WA. 2015-01-21
  4. ↑ Announcing First Wave of 2015 Special Guests: Jim Woodring & Bruce Bickford Archived September 7, 2015, at the Wayback Machine.
  5. ↑ http://www.brucebickford.com/casl-dvd/
  6. ↑ DVD Review: Legendary Clay Animator Bruce Bickford’s ‘CAS’L’
  7. ↑ Perpetual Motion Machine: A Bruce Bickford Retrospective. 2015-10-02
  8. ↑ The Amazing Mr. Bickford. Cartoon Brew. 2008-08-15.
  9. ↑ CAS'L'shown with Monster Road. Salem Film Festival'. 2009-04-24.
  10. ↑ Plastic Paper: Bruce Bickford's CAS'L with live score by MAHOGANY FROG, 2010-05-08.
  11. ↑ Feats of Clay: Bruce Bickford. 2010-05-27.

External links


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