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Interview

Felix Harvey p3

Animator Felix Harvey talks about how he started making stick figure animations...

READERSVOICE.COM: Your first short animated film The Hold Up was uploaded on YouTube in 2006. What gave you the idea to start making Flash animations?
 
FELIX HARVEY: I would say that when I first saw stick figure animations, I immediately found them hilarious and I loved it. And I tend to try to reproduce things that I enjoy. It’s the case in animation, music, mobile applications, or even video game maps or levels. So I tried it. I got the software, found some tutorials, and got to make a stickman moving, and that was fun.
And maybe a year later after my posts, I woke up and had 300 mails from YouTube in my inbox because Tha Cliff had been seen by many people, many of whom had commented on it. And I never knew why… And from that point I decided to make some more.
 
RV: Your tutorials on Youtube are very good and easy to understand. How long did it take you to learn the basics of Flash?

FH: First I would say really don’t know much with Flash… Flash is a really huge (and expensive) software with which you can do so many things and I did so little. And it is easy to see from my videos that the little I learned was by doing stuff with it. There is a noticeable difference between my old animations and my new ones. 
And every video I did made me learn something new. And when I noticed people were asking how to make this kind of stuff, I thought I could show them the little I knew. 
 
RV: Your short animation The Real Line Rider (2007) was influenced by a computer game. I wondered where you got some of you ideas for movies.

FX: Ideas come from anywhere; games, music, movies, school, peoples, habits, family. Without inspiration, it is really hard to do something good, especially with animation. It requires much patience and time to do these kind of animations, and if you are not inspired, if you don’t work on something that you, first of all, find funny or good, then you probably won’t finish it.
 
RV: How long does it take to make a cartoon like Tha Cliff (1,2 and 3)?

FX: As I recall, I think Tha Cliff 2 was the only animation that I looked a bit at the time spent on it and it was something like 20 to 25 hours.

RV: In movies like Cheese and New Bike Song, from 2011, you do your own music. How did you learn how to make music?
           
FH: Pretty much like animations; I got interested and I tried it. I got my first guitar when I was 12 but I’ve always liked to listen to music and I had a good talent in music classes before that age.
 
RV: Do you still plan to make some more animations, and will you do long stories or stick to short stories?
               
FH: I plan on buying the latest Flash while I’m still a student because of the 80% discount. But like I said, it takes time and inspiration, which don’t always come at the same time!  As for the length of the videos… They will be probably shorts because I can do them in less time, but it all depends on what ideas I will get. 

-See Youtube for the animations of Felix Harvey.
-copyright Simon Sandall.