Bruce Bickford

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Bruce Bickford (b. 1947) is an expert clay animation artist. He often collaborated with Frank Zappa, resulting in his most famous works such as The Amazing Mr. Bickford. His major debut of work was in the Frank Zappa movie Baby Snakes in which cut sequences depicted surreal animations of Bickford's own unique world and vision.

Often outwardly expressive as a disconnected individual (in his views of the world around him), Bruce Bickford's work was extremely subjective in its content and concepts, making for some truly disturbing and shocking imagery. Much of his video work depicted fast-moving, fluid-like transformations of human figures and disfigured faces into odd beasts on surreal structural settings with impressive camera effects (moving around within his stop-motion animation).

His life and work were featured in the 2004 biographical documentary film Monster Road, directed by Brett Ingram, which has won numerous film festival awards and garnered acclaim in many countries.

He is currently working on Boar's Head/Whore's Bed (line animation, 4500+ frames and counting), Tales of the Green River and Castle 2001, a feature-length film which is animated using 3D shapes made out of bits of paper.

A new DVD was released by Bright Eye Pictures in early 2008. It includes the first film that Bickford had complete control over, the 28-minute Prometheus' Garden. Although finished on 16mm in 1988, it has never had a proper release. The DVD also includes Luck of a Foghorn, a new 30-minute documentary about Bickford by the director of Monster Road. [1]