Photography has been repositioning Painting for a hundred and fifty years, and over the same period painting has acted as a precedent for photography. The interaction persists today. Many artists have worked with film over this period because they recognise the significance of photography, ideologically, practically and formally. I suppose, in a modest way, I belong in that company. I am not a movie buff in the usual sense. I only have a mild artistic interest in mainstream movies, or for that matter, in mainstream entertainment animation. I am more intrigued by the artistic and philosophical implications of the camera's point of view, the way photography can be used to make movement and the ideological implications of living in a culture which sees these conventions of representation as natural. When I go to the movies I just join in and enjoy. And I dont watch much TV either. There is not much to read about the corner of film-making I am really interested in - four or five books will do it - but there is a huge accumulation of work. There are thousands of films around the world languishing in small studios, archives, film laboratories and TV companies. Artists are well ahead of business here; I mean they have outwitted normal business constraints somehow. Most reviews of this work mention the early pioneers in Europe, quote Apollinaire saying that art animation will be the art of the future, and then follow the drift of the political migrants over to the States where they were more or less rolled over by Disney. But there is a much more involved story to be told than that. Jayne Pilling and Paul Webb, for example, have made a start. Perhaps as the new delivery media like DVD come into use short film will become more popular. Maybe random access will make short dense pieces more consumer friendly and then publishers and scholars will want to get involved with this sort of work. Who knows?

For artists like Fernand Leger, Man Ray and Lotte Reiniger it was a way of pursuing their art interests. Many such people explicitly used phrases like Ômoving painting', or Ôworking in film as if it were painting'. Robert Breer and Stan Brakhage are shown in art venues, both of them Modernist artists with their hearts set on making film like painting. To me this is all congenial thinking and these famous names have created an overlap tradition between the art of painting and film to which I want to belong.

Whilst animation in general is usually generated to film - the stop/go technique was impossible in video in the early years - it is TV which has made the recent UK renaissance possible. In the early eighties Channel 4, and in Wales S4C, began broadcasting and buying programmes. I was there from the beginning trying to get the new channels to put up money for me to work. In London the animation programmes eventually became the responsibility of Clare Kitson and in Cardiff, of Chris Grace; very different personalities in very different contexts. In Wales S4C had become, by a feat of Welsh politics, the Welsh language medium broadcaster. In London C4 was supposed to be more experimental and cosmopolitan. Because I had to raise so much money for my work I always had to make co-funding deals between TV companies. Getting them to speak to each other used up a lot of time and finding ways to bridge the cultures between two channels I found quite tricky. The editorial policy of different channels is partly fixed by the tastes of the commissioning editors, and partly (and now increasingly) by schedulers and strategists who see themselves as fighting the competition from other channels. The strategists are bosses to the editors so editors don't have an entirely clear field. It is beyond people of my station to second guess what an editor will like from one year to another; their own situations change, and they can seem to change their minds - but I don't know any other way than standing in the queue with all the thousands of other beggars holding out your wares for sale. I have only ever offered them the film I wanted to make next. Sometimes they buy, sometimes (like now for me) they don't! The prime source of support for art or personal film, once you are out of college and outside TV, is, I hate to say, a day job in the graphics or advertising industry, which takes all your time (you want to get on, don't you), which means you don't get much time to do your own stuff. It sounds sad but it has never been easy to make art which the business process doesn't see a use for, particularly if it costs money or time...