Daniel Greaves

Animator Daniel Greaves produced the short film ‘Manipulation’ in 1991 and won numerous awards including an Oscar. The animation shows a cartoonist draw a little man on the page and he then comes to life and mingles with a patch of spilt ink to give him colour, and then interacts with the cartoonist who tries to squash, pull, stretch and screw up the little figure. There is no sound to the piece other than a few light sound effects, and the figure is only made up of a few faint pencil lines but it is truly the inventive and comical way the cartoon moves about the page and interacts with the human hand that brings the character to life. It also involves lots of 3d stop motion as well as just 2d on the page for example he jumps up out of the page into a paper mache character, then falls off the desk and becomes 2d when he hits the floor. This gives it new life half way through and keeps the action flowing all the way to six and a half minutes long. The short must have been very well storyboarded and taken a very long time to produce but the end product is a masterpiece, in my design work I will have to try and storyboard my work before I carry it out so that I know exactly how long to make each section and know exactly what I want to happen at each stage of my piece.