Web exclusive: Miles’ passion for stop-motion includes filmmaking, collection

By: Monique Bos

Published: Thursday, July 12, 2007

Hal Miles, a professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, has spent much of his life immersed in the stop-motion animation industry. He shares his expertise — gained not only from working on a variety of film and television projects, but also from being mentored by animation great Ray Harryhausen and contacts with many other industry notables — with students in his animation and visual effects courses at SCAD.

As well as teaching, Miles remains active as a filmmaker and maintains an extensive collection of museum-quality armatures, partial and complete puppets, scenes and props, archives and much more. His home is equipped with everything he needs to create his own stop-animation pieces — including a big, movable camera rig, a climate-controlled studio for shooting and a dialogue stage.

Miles, who said he usually completes one or two short films each year, is working on an eight-minute film called “Robot Work” this summer.

“I interviewed real people about their jobs, edited [the transcripts] down and put them into funny situations with robots,” he explained.

The film will follow robots in six work environments: a one-hour photo studio, a coal mine shaft, a space station, a metal-stamping factory, a drop tower at an amusement park and a high-rise bridge.

Miles based the coal miner character on a man he interviewed in Kentucky — a man who has since moved to Savannah and is working as Miles’ assistant on the project. “He ended up taking a couple of my stop-motion classes,” the professor said.

The sets are all miniature scale-models of the work environments and the items found within each. Miles and his assistant are constructing all the miniatures and sets themselves.

The comic nature of the film contrasts vividly with his most recent release, “The Madness of Being,” which has been screened around the world and won the Special Jury Award for Most Outstanding Film at the Winnipeg Film Festival. Jamey Scott served as the sound designer and composer, and Kevin Thomas, who has been Miles’ best friend since junior high school, was the film’s editor. As teens, Thomas and Miles discovered, learned about and began to produce stop-motion animation together.

Miles said that while the film seems bleak and troubling, his primary interest is in the responses it elicits from viewers.

“It’s more important to me for you to think about what you got out of it,” he explained. “My inspiration was this madness, this darkness, this extreme frustration the character was in. I think we all go through it to some extent.”

Miles spends much of his time in environments conducive to inspiration: At SCAD, he said he constantly is amazed by the work his students produce, and at home, he is surrounded by memorabilia, which he acquires from all over the world, often participating in international auctions via telephone. His knowledge of the items in his collection, their history and their significance is encyclopedic.

Among the remarkable pieces in Miles’ collection — many of which are the only such items known to be still in existence — are the following:

•  Silhouette drawings by Lottie Reiniger, who created the first animated feature film, “Prince Achmed,” in 1926, well before Disney released “Snow White” (1937). Reiniger was “considered by far the greatest silhouette artist of all time,” Miles said.
•  Tapes or DVDs of every stop-motion film and “significant” stop-motion television commercial.
•  The camera filters used by Willis O’Brien in the original “King Kong” film. Although Miles never met O’Brien, he became close friends with his widow, Darlene, through Harryhausen, and she left the filter camera to Miles in her will.
•  Paper archives that contain “80 to 85 percent of all the material that’s ever been printed about stop-motion animation,” Miles said. “I’m always coming across new material.”
•  The camera tripod used by Charlie Chaplin when he opened his first studio in the United States.
•  A replica of the only original “King Kong” armature that still exists. Miles said his piece is one of 500 replicas made and is 95 percent accurate.
•  Photographs dating back to the 1920s, some autographed. One photo, which Miles shot himself, features Harryhausen, along with science fiction writer Ray Bradbury and “King Kong” star Fay Wray.
•  A T-800 robot head from “Terminator II,” which Miles worked on for the film.
•  The No. 15 chicken hut and boiler from “Chicken Run."
•  Puppets of all the original characters from the 1980s “Gumby” television show.
•  Puppets of the Pillsbury Doughboy and rows of his heads — including “toxic Doughboy,” “pretzel man Doughboy” and “Siamese twin Doughboy,” created for fun by Miles and other animators who worked on the commercials. “You get kind of goofy when you do these projects,” he explained. “You do little things like this. It’s all in good fun.”
•  California Raisins and a Noid from the 1980s Pizza Hut commercials, both produced by Will Vinton’s Claymation studio.
•  A centipede puppet and several seagulls from the film “James and the Giant Peach.”
•  The mother’s animatronic head and the father’s animatronic tail from the 1980s television show “Dinosaurs.”
•  The Woody Allen puppet from MTV’s “Celebrity Death Match.”

Miles hopes to someday open a museum to showcase his collection — and benefit SCAD students in every major, who can see the ways in which various artistic disciplines combine to produce award-winning films and animations.

Read more about Miles.