24 Facts About Will Vinton

William Gale Vinton was an American animator and filmmaker.

Will Vinton won an Oscar for his work alongside several Emmy Awards and Clio Awards for his studio's work.

Will Vinton was born on November 17,1947, to a car dealer father and a bookkeeper mother in McMinnville, Oregon.

Will Vinton's paternal grandfather, William T Vinton, was a well known state senator in Oregon, representing Portland.

Will Vinton received his bachelor's degree in architecture from UC Berkeley in 1970.

Gardiner refined his sculpting and animation techniques while Will 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.

Quickly expanding his studio by hiring new animators, Will Vinton produced dozens of commercials for regional and then national companies.

Still with only a handful of animators, Will Vinton produced a trilogy of 27-minute films of a short stories like fairy tales in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Martin the Cobbler, the Oscar-nominated Rip Van Winkle, and The Little Prince.

In 1978, Will Vinton produced the documentary Claymation: Three Dimensional Clay Animation a 17-minute film featuring the behind-the-scenes technical processes used.

The term "claymation" was later trademarked by Will Vinton, and has become synonymous with clay animation in general.

In May 1985, Will Vinton Productions released their first and only theatrical film The Adventures of Mark Twain.

Will Vinton contributed to a consumer-grade computer animation application called Playmation, developed by Hash, Inc.

Will Vinton had high hopes that the special, which was animated in Claymation, would become a perennially rerun special.

Will Vinton soon coined a new term for this process, Foamation.

In 2002, Will Vinton lost control of the studio he founded after Knight became the majority shareholder and Will Vinton failed to garner funds for further feature production in Los Angeles, eventually being dismissed from the studio.

Will Vinton later sought damages for this and sued for ownership of his name.

In 2005, Will Vinton produced The Morning After, the first short film under the new company.

Will Vinton taught at the Portland branch of The Art Institutes and maintained an office there as an artist in residence.

Will Vinton created a musical titled The Kiss, an adaptation of The Frog Prince with music by David Pomeranz that premiered on March 24,2014, in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

In 2006, Will Vinton was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and retired in 2008 from producing films.

Will Vinton died in Portland, Oregon, on October 4,2018, after a 12-year battle with the disease at the age of 70.

Will Vinton was the subject of the documentary film Claydream, which was directed by Marq Evans and released at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.

The moving image collection of Will Vinton is housed at the Academy Film Archive.

The Academy Film Archive has preserved several of Will Vinton's films, including Closed Mondays, The Creation, The Great Cognito, Dinosaur, Legacy, and A Christmas Gift.