Moving Characters is a Challenge

Photo: Tom Gasek

Getting Gumby and Pokey to move is difficult and time-consuming. It's not because the characters are lazy. It's just that they are made of clay, so movements are done by hand during a slow, labor-intensive process that requires each frame of the film to be shot separately.

The new Gumby and Pokey clean air public service announcement developed for the American Lung Association of California uses a clay animation process. Film is shot at 24 frames a second, so each second of the 30-second public service announcement required 24 "pictures" to be taken. When those pictures are run together at 24 frames a second, it appears that the characters are moving.

Producing the public service announcement involved the collaboration of some of the most creative people in the stop animation business who donated their time, including Tom Gasek, an award-winning animator who works at Suspended Animation in Lenox, Mass. Gasek has done much of the animation for other Gumby and Pokey projects and is highly respected in the industry for his work.

Art Clokey, who created Gumby in 1955 and Pokey in 1956, allowed the characters to be used at no cost because he believes in the message.

"Back in 1953,1 wrote a letter to the transportation authority complaining about the diesel fumes spewed into the air by county buses," he said. Since then he's continued to advocate for strong environmental policies.

"We called out favors to get all this stuff done," said Chris Johnston of Blacktop Films and volunteer creative director/producer. "We had to get the film donated, the creative work, the processing, everything."

Johnston was responsible for taking the film shot by Suspended Animation and putting it together with stock footage of traffic and congestion scenes for the final product. The public service announcement is vintage Gumby and Pokey. It shows them walking up to a book, as they do in their series, and then poking their heads into it. The next scene shows them from the reverse, with their heads poked through a wall in the world they are seeing on the other side. In the public service announcement, that world is full of cars, buses, trucks and a lot of air pollution.

The voice of Gumby and Pokey is done by Steven Buckley, who has been Gumby's voice for many years. Andres Navia did the voiceover for the Spanish version of the public service announcement.

Most of the 30-second spot was shot on a set at Suspended Animation. It took three weeks to shoot what was then edited down to 15 seconds of the public service announcement.

"We were happy to be part of it," said Byars Cole, another project volunteer and executive producer at Suspended Animation. "It's important to us to be able to use our skills and talents for this type of work."

More than 20 volunteers and companies donated their time and resources to make the campaign a success.

Gumby and Pokey Help Fight Air Pollution

Actor Walks the Environmental Talk

More information on outdoor air quality.