Willie Nillie Character
Willie Nillie is a basic 2D cartoon character created in November of 1991 by myself (Brian) and Robert Reed (location currently unknown), based on a fellow classmate. 1991 put us both in Grade 8, so the character was far from stellar. Created in black-and-white (think Fido Dido from the old 7-Up commercials), he originally wore a flowery t-shirt with bell bottom pants, with a kind of squat curvy head. Shortly after, the bell bottoms and hippie top were lost in favour for a plain t-shirt and shorts, and his head became a bit longer.
Willie Nillie was featured in hundreds of adolescent flipbooks drawn in 1991 and 1992 by three of us (the two mentioned above plus another who joined in shortly after). A fun but tedious hobby, the rudimentary flipbooks played like a short gag cartoon most of the time, with the cartoon ending with some stupid visual gag or joke. Flipbooks that didn't follow this pattern often tried new things with animation, such as first person perspective animation, rotation, scaling, and 3D effects - yes, the type of 3D that uses the red and blue lenses.
Willie Nillie was basically only used for flipbooks until about 1993. By then, drawing flipbooks had grown tiresome (in fact, by the end of Grade 8 we stopped drawing flipbooks; we were high school bound, afterall!). In the autumn 1993 or so, I decided to use Willie Nillie in an english project about parenting. The project turned out to be a full-sized flipbook (8 1/2 x 11). At this point I decided to make up a company under which the flipbook was "made", called Willie Nillie Productions. I also obtained all the rights to Willie Nillie from my co-creator friend (Rob), so that I had unrestricted use of him in the future...though I do not have the piece of paper with our signatures on it anymore.
After that point, anything I did that involved any kind of media, be it art, movies, computer programs, etc., would contain "Willie Nillie Productions" somewhere. During this period Willie Nillie was rarely seen by anyone except for the odd English class project, including a balloon-head puppet re-enactment of a scene from Hamlet (with Willie playing the title character). Flipbooks had started being drawn again by me, but these were done mostly for experimenting with animation techniques again, were not shown to anyone. Once college started, Willie Nillie was used extensively in name and character for various projects including movie posters, interactive programs and games, proposal reports, and 3D animations which featured a ho-hum rendition of Willie in 3D. Because of the complexity of the 3D animation software, and the overall design of Willie Nillie in general, turning him 3 dimensional was a very difficult and not very successful task. No attempts have been made since that first one to render him in 3D again to this point, though it may be attempted again one day. The biggest change made to Willie since losing his hippie garb was in October 2006 when he was drawn with the tradtional 3 fingers and a thumb, instead of the real world 4 fingers and thumb.
