When a person can craft a 1940s educational film into pure comedy, you have won me over as a permanent fan. That person is Scott Bateman, an “animator in New York City“. His latest project shows how funny stamps can be…seriously. Until very recently, Bateman’s work was featured at Salon.com–but Bateman Animation can also be found at True/Slant and his YouTube channel. With his run at Salon ending, Bateman is devoting more time to generating interest in his film, Atom Age Vampire, which we also get to discuss. My thanks to friend of the blog, Mary Jo Pehl, for introducing me to the greatness of Bateman’s work. And my thanks to Bateman for this email interview.

Tim O’Shea: How do you go about tracking down obscure audio like “Actual audio from the 1947 educational film Using The Bank“. And from there, how do you typically go about writing the script that you run in parallel with the animation. Do you write the script before starting the animation work?

Scott Bateman: There is a wealth of amazing material in the Prelinger Archives at archive.org, a web site that hosts a vast array of public domain material. The Prelinger Archives specializes in short educational and industrial films from the 1940s and 1950s–hygiene, cold war propoganda, juvenile delinquency, it’s all there. Man, I can spend hours on that site!

My writing process for these animations goes something like this: I’ll end up watching a film several times while I animate it, because I’ll go through once and animate bodies, then another time through for mouths, another for hands, etc. So by the time I add the commentary, I already have a ton of snarky comments about the film at my disposal. I’ll put in the comments I most want in the movie first, then fill in the holes between.

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