Lifelong passion for stop-motion animation inspires Miles

 
Photo by Photo by Charlie Ribbens


By: Monique Bos
Published: Friday, July 13, 2007

Harold “Hal” Miles, an animation professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, has turned his home into a virtual museum of stop-motion animation, visual effects and other film-related items. His vast collection includes DVDs, videos, posters from movies he’s worked on, autographed photos, stop-motion puppets and armature, scenes and props from films, and exhaustive paper archives.

It isn’t surprising that Miles would choose to live in the midst of so much stop-motion memorabilia; he has spent most of his life immersed in the field. As a teenager in Indiana in the 1970s, he was attracted to animation after seeing the 1949 film “Mighty Joe Young.”

“I was possessed!” he explained. “There was this giant gorilla, and we knew it wasn’t a real gorilla because it was 18-20 feet high. We became obsessed with finding out how it was done.”

He and his best friend found some behind-the-scenes photos in Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Film magazine — which they happened across at a local drugstore. They studied stop-motion movies, television commercials and magazines to try to figure out the secrets of the craft. By the time he graduated from high school, Miles and his friend had produced and directed stop-motion commercials for a local grocery chain.

He also had made some valuable contacts in the industry. Perhaps most notable was animator Ray Harryhausen, who has mentored Miles throughout his career and with whom he remains friends.

“I first started corresponding with him when I was a young teenager, back in the early ’70s,” said Miles. “He helps me out and gives me advice.”

He first contacted Harryhausen through the editor of a small, four-issue fan magazine devoted to the animator’s work. They corresponded, eventually met and formed a friendship in Los Angeles, where Miles moved after high school.

He had relocated to L.A. ostensibly to attend film school but actually to find work in stop-motion animation. He realized that aim when he was hired at Cascade Pictures, so he attended college at night and worked during the day.

“About six months in, I got to work on my first animation, which was the Pillsbury Doughboy,” he said. “I got to bow him out of stop motion before he went digital.”

He went on to work with a range of characters, including the robots in “Terminator II” and many others.

His collection includes many samples of his own work, as well as a variety of drawings, armature, puppets, scenes and props from many of his idols in the industry. His ultimate goal is to open a museum devoted to stop-motion animation — and he thinks this will be a valuable resource for SCAD students, regardless of their majors.

“All the different art forms are put together in creating this work,” he said.

Miles is as enthusiastic about teaching at SCAD — where he has conducted animation and visual effects classes since 2001 — as he is about stop motion.

“I try my very best to inspire our SCAD students to reach their potential, their goals and dreams,” he said. “Having been mentored by some of the true giants in the entertainment industry — who themselves were mentored by, in most cases, the true pioneers of the entertainment industry — allows me the opportunity to pass on this lineage to these wonderful students.”

He also continues to create and produce short films, completing one or two each year. His most recent film, “The Madness of Being,” has appeared in festivals around the world, including in Italy and at the Winnipeg International Film Festival, where he received the Special Jury Award for Most Outstanding Film. In late July, he plans to attend and participate in several panel sessions at the Woods Hole Film Festival in Cape Cod, Mass., where the film also will be screened.

He also is working on an eight-minute short called “Robot Work.” The film features six characters describing their jobs. The dialogue is taken from actual interviews Miles conducted with people in a variety of industries, but he has altered some of the jobs and situations for comic effect.

Miles said he’s very happy to be in Savannah — and despite the wealth of experience he brings to the classroom, his students aren’t the only ones who benefit.

“When teaching, I have the opportunity to walk through our classrooms and see what our students are creating, and I’m constantly inspired by what they are doing,” he said. “So as much as I try to inspire them to achieve whatever they set out to accomplish, I am rewarded many times over by the inspiration of their creations.”


Read more about Miles’ collection and his films.