Will Vinton

Will Vinton
Will Vinton at Anifest 2012
Born	(1947-11-17) November 17, 1947 (age 69) McMinnville, Oregon
Nationality	American
Occupation	Film director, producer, claymation director, stop-motion animator, writer
Years active	1974–present

Will Vinton (born November 17, 1947 in McMinnville, Oregon) is an American director and producer of animated films. He has won an Oscar for his work, and several Emmy Awards and Clio Awards for his studio's work.

During the 1960s, Vinton studied physics, architecture and filmmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was influenced by the work of Antoni Gaudí. During this time, Vinton made a black-and-white feature-length documentary film about the California counter-culture movement titled Gone For a Better Deal, which toured college campuses in various film festivals of the time. Two more films about student protest followed, Berkeley Games and First Ten Days, as well a narrative short Reply, and his first animation, Culture Shock.

Meeting clay animator Bob Gardiner in the Berkeley, California area in the early 1970s, Vinton brought him to Portland and they commandeered Vinton's home basement to make a quick 1½-minute test film of clay animation (and the supporting armatures) called Wobbly Wino, completed in early 1973. Gardiner refined his sculpting and animation skills while Vinton built a system for animating his Bolex Rex-5 16mm camera and they began work in mid-1973 on an 8-minute 16mm short film about a drunk wino who stumbles into a closed art museum and interacts with the paintings and sculptures. Completed in late 1974 after 14 months of production, the film combined Gardiner's sculpting skills with Vinton's camera skills and Closed Mondays won an Oscar for best animated short film in the spring of 1975, the first film produced in Portland to do so.