Bob Bura
Animator who with John Hardwick made ‘stop-frame’ children’s classics such as Camberwick Green
BOB BURA, who has died aged 93, was one of the most innovative animators of his generation, and with John Hardwick, helped to bring to life the Trumptonshire trilogy of tales that have entertained children and their parents for 50 years. Now regarded as classics of their type, the trilogy of Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley were originally transmitted between 1966 and 1968 in the “Watch with Mother” slot on BBC Television. Gordon Murray, the creator and producer, provided the puppets and storylines, while Bura and Hardwick filmed the series meticulously, using stop-frame (also known as stopmotion) animation.
Originally called Candlewick Green until a typing error in the BBC contract altered its name forever, Camberwick Green (1966) was set in a world totally divorced from reality – a traditional English village whose puppet inhabitants were ignorant of such modern social blights as crime and vandalism, and (in an attempt to teach children to be kind to each other) went around being friendly and cooperative.
At the start of each episode, a musical box would play, rotate and open to reveal the character around which the episode was based. This might be Mrs Honeyman, the village gossip, Windy Miller, who made the flour, or Thomas Tripp, the milkman.
In Trumpton (1967), the stories were set in a neighbouring market town, each episode starting with “the Trumpton clock. Telling the time steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly. Telling the time for Trumpton.” The day would then begin with perhaps Chippy Minton in his truck or Mr Troop, the town hall clerk, who needed the slightest excuse to call the Trumpton Fire Brigade – Pugh, Pugh, Barney Mcgrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub.
A third cast of characters inhabited Chigley (1968), including Lord Belborough of Winkstead Hall and his butler Brackett, with his plodding walk; the pair travelled about in Bessie the steam engine (“Time flies by when I’m the driver of a train …”).
Bura and Hardwick were already experienced in the production of stopmotion animation – their company was named Stop Motion Productions – when Murray entrusted them with the filming of Camberwick Green. But 13 episodes was an undertaking on a virtually unprecedented scale, not least because they were responsible for all other aspects of the shooting process including lighting and camera operation.
Studio assistants were brought in to work on the animation, while Murray devised a clockwork camera mechanism that would take a still frame at regular intervals without any need for time-consuming camera maintenance, although this proved impractical and was soon dropped.
Other innovations were more successful. Bura and Hardwick rebuilt Murray’s original puppets (constructed from foam, ping-pong balls and an articulated metal framework) to give them greater flexibility, and came up with the idea of pinning the creations to a soft base rather than the traditional time-consuming method of screwing them in place. There were also some unforeseen complications which did not become obvious until the finished film was played back. Keen-eyed viewers may have spotted trees descending menacingly as they warped under the heat of the studio lights. In another episode, a shot of a bees’ nest being sprayed was noticeably filmed in real time, with the puppets themselves remaining motionless throughout.
Eventually Bura and Hardwick were able to produce an average of two minutes and 30 seconds of footage a week and, such was their attention to detail, no further editing was required. Moreover, it was they who encouraged Murray, who had been toying with using black and white film to reduce costs, to make the series in colour to ensure a longer shelf life.
Robert Barnett Bura was born in London on September 25 1924, one of 11 children of a Romanian émigré, Moise Bura, and his wife Lucy (née Blinkhorn), a vaudeville singer. The young Bob worked variously as a vaudeville artiste, conjurer, ventriloquist, juggler, fire-eater and puppeteer. Helped by Hardwick, he staged Punch and Judy shows on Southsea beach.
In 1956 he and Hardwick were taken on by the BBC Puppet Theatre and it was there, while working on A Rubovian Legend, that they met Gordon Murray, for whom they operated the rod puppets for Toytown. They also helped Jan and Vlasta Dalibor manipulate the puppets on Pinky and Perky. Bura was also commissioned to make animated illustrations for BBC schools’ science programmes.
With Hardwick, Bura’s first animated films were cinema advertisements, and the pair later made animated inserts for Blue Peter, Pops & Lenny, and Hey Presto! It’s Rolf [Harris]. Camberwick Green was filmed in a former church of the Agapemonite sect in Crouch End (they later shared the space and eventually sold it to Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics).
Filming the Trumptonshire series was a painstaking business. Each week Bura and Hardwick shot a 100ft roll of 16mm film, taking an average of one frame every 30 seconds. The result was some 4,000 frames and about 2min 45 seconds of puppet action. Thus the 13 episodes of Camberwick Green – each of a quarter of an hour – took about a year to finish. Although the creators could not see the results until the whole reel had been processed, it was invariably perfectly synchronised.
Bura and Hardwick also did the animation for Mary, Mungo and Midge (1969) and Captain Pugwash in the 1970s, and made an acclaimed puppet film of Stravinsky and Benois’s ballet Pétrouchka (1968).
Around this time they moved their studio to Somerset; by coincidence, the building they bought was the original Agapemone church, the “Abode of Love” where the breakaway clergyman Henry James Prince had set up as a polygamist in the 19th century.
Hardwick died in 2004.
Bob Bura, born September 25 1924, died April 7 2018