February 22, 2006
Animator receives Carnegie Medal
Matt Clinton earned award for nine-minute short
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Emmy, Carnegie Medal: just three years out of college, Matt Clinton is stacking up awards.
An animator with Michael Sporn Animation in New York City, the Traverse City native was part of a team that recently received the prestigious 2006 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Children's Video for the short film "The Man Who Walked Between the Towers." This nine-minute piece, which also made the short list for the Academy Awards this year, tells the story of Philippe Petit, who walked a high wire strung between the World Trade Center in 1974. One of a team of three animators, Clinton's second major project with the company was a collaboration with Weston Woods Studios.
"I describe it as pen and ink drawings painted colorfully," said Clinton from his apartment in Greenwich Village. "It basically reproduces the style of the book that it was based on and what we do is a lot of adaptations of children's books."
Fascinated with animation since he was a child, Clinton gives a nod to Walt Disney as his first main influence. An avid drawer and animator all his life, Clinton connected with Tom Mills of Mills Animation and Design in Lake Ann during junior high when he attended an after-school program led given by Mills and Rich Brauer of Brauer Productions. That experience helped hone his talent in animation and cement his vision of a professional career.
"I would say I started getting into [animation] in grade school, basically I would do a lot of cartooning on my own," he recalled of his years at Glenn Loomis Elementary School. "I started taking quite a few art classes in high school and at that time I did cartooning for the school paper."
After graduating from Traverse City Senior High in 1996, Clinton worked for Mills until 1999. He also attended Northwestern Michigan College, where he drew for the White Pine Press and took art and general education classes there.
"He's always had the books, all the drawing books, and has always been very artistic," said Matt's father, David Clinton. "He can draw anything that you want to draw."
Clinton then realized a dream: studying character animation at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. He received a BFA degree from that school in 2002 and returned to Traverse City.
He worked in the Computing Center at the Traverse Area District Library, sending out his resume and portfolio, until Michael Sporn Animation hired him in the fall of 2003. Clinton has worked there since then, part of an award-winning team that in 2004 garnered an Emmy for Outstanding Children's Program for "Happy to be Nappy and Other Stories of Me." Other company projects include short films for HBO, Galastic and PBS.
"This is a good set up for me, I'm definitely having fun working here," said Clinton. "Actually, my boss and I draw quite a bit alike and have the same preferences as far as animation goes so we work really well together."
Clinton and his colleagues still draw by hand, though the studio uses computers to put the drawings on film. The illustration process is three steps: drawing the image, putting ink lines over it on a clean sheet of paper, putting it into the computer.
"We color on the computer but we do it in a way that it looks like real paint," he said.
Thousands of drawings are involved in each project, each hand-drawn one at a time. Shot at eight frames a second, for example, the nine-minute "The Man Who Walked Between the Towers" has about 4,320 images.
"At between 12-24 frames per second, the animation seems smoother," said Clinton. "But actually doing it with eight drawings per second gives it more of an illustrated look because you can kind of appreciate that it's drawings that are moving."