The Raggy Dolls

I trawled through all my really old reels a few weeks ago for the presentation I gave at the co-op young peoples film festival. On one old VHS tape I found a couple of episodes of "The Raggy Dolls" which I actually did camera work on. At 16, I blagged a couple weeks at Orchid Productions and persuaded them to let me loose doing sound breakdown and working in the camera room, on top of animation and drawing tuition from the brilliant Mark Mason. No computer lip-sync systems. And of course all the animation drawings were transferred to cells and filmed under pressure class onto 16mm film. It's so amazing how much animation production has changed and really exciting. A lot of the tedium which cost studies a lot of money is now being redirected into richer animation and more elaborate set-ups. Mark Mason redesigned the Raggy Dolls to what you see above. He taught me an incredible amount about drawing and dared me to push my skills. A real inspiration. Thanks Mark.