Smallfilms was a partnership between Oliver Postgate (writer and narrator) and Peter Firmin (modelmaker and animator).
In 1957 Postage was appointed a stage manager with Associated-Rediffusion, which then held the television franchise for London.[1] Attached to the children's programming section, he thought he could do better with the relatively low budgets of the then black and white television productions.
Postgate wrote Alexander the Mouse, a story about a mouse born to be king. Using an Irish produced magnetic system on which animated characters were attached to a painted background, and then shot through a 45degree mirror, he persuaded Firmin to create the background scenes. Postgate later recalled they undertook around 26 of these programs live to air, which were made more problematic by the production problems encountered by use and restrictions of using magnets.[1]
After the relative success of Alexander the Mouse, Postgate agreed a deal to make the next series on film, for a budget of £175 per program.[1] Making a stop motion animation table on his bedroom, he wrote the Chinese story The Journey of Master Ho which was intended for deaf children, a distinct advantage in that this form of production required no soundtrack and hence reduced production costs. He engaged an honorary Chinese painter to produce the backgrounds, but as he was classically Chinese trained he produced them in three-quarters view, rather than in the conventional Egyptian full view manner used for flat animation under a camera.[1] This resulted in the Firmin produced characters looking like they were short in one leg, but its success provided the foundation for Postgate and Firmin to start up their own company solely producing animated children's programmes.
Setting up their business in a disused cowshed at Firmin's home near Canterbury, Kent,[2][1] Postgate and Firmin worked on children's animation programmes. Based on concepts which mostly originated with Postgate, while while Firmin did the artwork and built the models; Postgate wrote the scripts, did the stop motion filming and many of the voices. Smallfilms was resultantly able to produce two minutes of film a day, ten times as much as a conventional animation studio,[2] with Postgate moving the cardboard pieces himself, and working his 16mm camera frame-by-frame with a home-made clicker. As Postgate wholly voiced many of the productions, including the WereBear story tapes, his distinctive voice became familiar to generations of children.
They started in 1959 with Ivor the Engine, a series for ITV about a Welsh steam engine who wanted to sing in a choir. Based on Postgate's wartime encounter with Welshman Denzyl Ellis, who used to be the fireman on the Royal Scot,[1] it was remade in colour for the BBC in the 1970s. This was followed by Noggin the Nog for the BBC, which established Smallfilms as a safe and reliable pair of hands to produce children's entertainment, when there were only two UK television channels. Postgate later described the "gentlemanly and rather innocent" business thus:[2]
We would go to the BBC once a year, show them the films we'd made, and they would say: Yes, lovely, now what are you going to do next? We would tell them, and they would say: That sounds fine, we'll mark it in for eighteen months from now, and we would be given praise and encouragement and some money in advance, and we'd just go away and do it.
In October 2008, production company Coolbai acquired the rights to a number of the Smallfilms productions, and announced their intention to produce a new series of Bagpuss episodes, and latterly episodes of The Clangers and Ivor the Engine.[3]
The name "Smallfilms" is appropriate in a number of ways: