Ian Boone Timothy won three national gold medals for his stop motion animated episodes, Beaver Creek. His first video camera and early visits to the zoo were just the beginning of his budding career as an animator. Ian’s early success in film and animation came at just fourteen, when he won the AT&T Virtual Science Challenge for a scientific video about beavers. Continuing with the beaver theme, he created the stop motion animation series Beaver Creek, a humorous take on modern life through the perspective of two main characters, Twigs the Beaver and Drake the Duck. Though Twigs and Drake live by a forest creek, they also shop on Treebay.com, snack on Stick-O’s and enjoy the comforts of modern living like “Insta-Lodges,” laptops and flat screen TVs. Each episode of Beaver Creek is less than 5 minutes long, but even a few seconds of animation is the result of three-four months of work. The first episode alone took almost 300 hours to create over the course of a summer. Ian works on his films in his spare time, after school and during summer vacations.
Like a lot of films, the animations are a collaborative effort. Music and voices come with the help of Ian’s father, who is also a musician. The theme song promises: “Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, let’s go take a peek; There’s always an adventure up on Beaver Creek.”
You can catch Ian’s work in our traveling exhibition Art.Write.Now, which recently opened in Dallas, TX and will visit Seattle, WA, Los Angeles, CA, and Philadelphia, PA, over the next six months.
To learn more about Timothy and his work, take a peek at this article about him from The Highlander Online.
Visit our Youtube channel to see more work by Ian Timothy and other 2010 Film and Animation winners.
Photo, above: Videotaping Beaver Creek is labor intensive and tedious, and on an average school day, Ian is able to produce only two to four seconds of animation, with each episode taking three to four months to produce. “I usually try to work a few hours after school,” he says. (Photo: brianbohannon.com)