Pearce Studios was founded in 1951 by Lionel and Susie Pearce.

Lionel studied Commercial Art at Chelsea School of Art then worked at Kodak in the Display Department. He went on to Gaumont British Information in the late 1930s. In the early 1940s GBI was evacuated to Moor Hall near Maidenhead in Berkshire. This was where the effort continued to produce information content towards the War effort.

Along with Smith-Morris Lionel set up and ran Polytechnic Films at Taplow in the late 1940s. He then set up Eagle Studios with Henry Stringer in St James' Place, London. They were doing graphics for television advertising and were part of Rayant Pictures, a documentary film company.

In 1951 Lionel set up Pearce Studios with Susie Pearce while continuing for a while to run Eagle Studios. Lionel was an early member of the London Sketch Club which started in Marylebone and moved to Chelsea. He served for an annual term as President.

Li was a genius at inventing economic ways of solving animation problems, very often with 2D models that he manipulated frame-by-frame under the camera. He got great satisfaction from achieving the required result without the slave labour of producing thousands of cels. He was also gifted as an engineer, and hand-crafted much of the rostrum and back-projection equipment used by the studio.

He was an active and productive member of the studio up to and including his last day at the age of 76.

Susie Dean went to Harrow Art School and then ran a Draper's shop with her mother going on to became a camerawoman at Gaumont British in Soho. She was transferred out of London during WW2 to Moor Hall, near Maidenhead. Susie became Susie Pearce and set up Pearce Studios with Lionel at the start of the 1950s. Susie was crucial in starting the studio, and in keeping it going by managing all the paperwork in the early days and as a rostrum camera woman till her retirement in 1978.

In 1969-70 Li and Susie's daughter Val and I were both working at ICEM (Industrial, Commercial & Educational Macmillan) in Richmond. Head of the animation department was Lela Stanley, who had previously worked for Li since leaving school, and had been trained by him. The senior animator was Maurice Cannon, also ex-Pearce Studios.

I had handed in my notice to check out opportunities in Soho, and Val asked me if I could possibly help her dad out for a couple of weeks first. The couple of weeks became a couple of months … and so on. The studio at this point housed Li, Susie, John Percy (who had been working as Li's assistant for some time) and me. The work continued to build up and I asked Dave Hall (a mate from St Martin's) if he could spare time from his back-stage work in West End theatres to help out for a bit. Now there were 5.

Then another mate from college was roped in for a bit. Tony Stead had been working for Honey Magazine and was in a gap before his next job. Now there were 6. Mike Hickin had been working at ICEM and he was co-opted. Now there were 7. An illustrator friend, David Baird, was also dragged in. Now there were 8. Val stopped working for ICEM and came to join the throng. Now there were 9. Betty Day had worked in Soho and for Li before starting her family. Now her kids were a bit older she was enticed back. Now there were 10.

Some of these came and went on a short-term freelance basis. Tony went off to another magazine job. David Baird left to become a gardener - he said he then still wanted to do his own drawing in his own time. Mike Hickin went off to other studios but came back from time to time to do a stint. Later he ran the Medi-cine animation dept before founding Magic Touch with a partner.

So during 1971 the number of people working elbow-to-elbow in the studio in Slough fluctuated around eight. A dark-room had been constructed in Val's old bedroom as more and more work involved using photographic techniques and back-lighting.

In 1972 it was decided that Pearce Studios should become Limited. Val and I were appointed directors alongside Li and Susie. Before the end of the year the majority of us, with two rostrum cameras and the darkroom, moved into premises in Hanwell, near Ealing, in the ground floor of a building occupied by Athos Films. I was appointed MD. Li, Susie and Val continued to work in the Slough studio, retaining one of the rostrum cameras there. John Percy, Dave Hall, Betty Day and Hattie Widgery (a new PA) moved with me into the new premises. Mick Sutton, the cameraman from ICEM in Richmond re-assembled and comissioned the 2 rostrum cameras. Mike Hickin did a few freelance stints as did Dave Kellehar, who also later formed his own company in soho.

In early 1973 there was a falling out with Cygnet Films, who were a major client at that time, over the working relationship. Cygnet had got used to thinking of us and treating us as an in-house graphics department and became very aggressive when I tried to introduce contracts for each production. Consequently an uncomfortable period ensued with a load of people sitting around with not much to do in new premises with lots of new rent to pay. For a while the bank manager was extremely edgy.

Halas and Bachelor were producing an animated series of "The Count of Monte Christo" and "The Jackson Five" and I managed to obtain service work from them. This entailed collecting large stacks of boxes with key drawings for tracing, and traced cels for painting. This would be divided up and distributed around the studio, and also among two or three outside freelancers. Then it would all be collected in, sorted, cleaned, checked, and delivered back to H&B.

This kept things ticking over and gradually other work picked up again. Maralyn Levett joined the studio. Hattie left and Gigi took her place. Through the remaining years of the 70s the quantity of work fluctuated, as of course it always does. Some work was still for clients of the original Pearce Studios, some was from new clients, some came through Athos Films who occupied the top floor. One or two jobs came from Mick Sutton who had set up his own company, Wardour Motion Pictures, making commercials in soho. A substantial quantity of the throughput was for MOD training films.

Most of the time it was manically busy with everyone working very long hours, but once or twice there were black holes. In one of these black holes Dave Hall and I decided that as nothing much was happening we might as well go and have a look at the St Martin's dip show. Afterwards we adjourned to a pub in Wardour Street, and as it was a sunny day we settled with pints on the pavement outside. The shadow of a passing pedestrian stopped and moved back. "Hi Rod". It was an account exec from an agency that had been involved in one of the jobs from Wardour Motion Pictures. "Are you busy ? 'Cos I need to get a load of stuff done."

So began a hectic period of doing designs and artwork for Arcade records. There were vinyl album sleeves, front and back, plus posters, flyers and banners, audio casette sleeves, and mock-ups for the TV commercials. The darkroom was in heavy use and bikes were busy with last minute photo typesetting for changes in the middle of the night. A unit with ultra violet lamps was constructed for making Autotype sheets (like custom made letraset). Some of the mock-ups needed stuff like actual gold printing. Li made a large silkscreen frame with interchangeable registered screens and the photo masks were made on the ultra violet unit. Both Elvis and Beatles compilations mockups were among those produced via this route.

This all filled the hole and made the bank manager a little happier and gradually animation work took over again. So much of it was technically orientated that Dave began to bleat frequently from his corner that what was really needed was a computer. Computers were still pretty esoteric things at the end of the 70s and weren't exactly available off the shelf. But finally, to keep Dave relatively quiet, I asked him to research what was around. Gigi had left to be replaced by Elaine. Elaine had been a high powered PA to Dave Harris, a special effects merchant on the first Superman movie. Dave Harris had just closed down his studio off Cambridge Circus to take up some large movie jobs.

Elaine didn't actually stay very long. She was really too high powered for our rather quirky little studio after working on stuff like Superman and "A Bridge too Far" among several others. She got rather bored as she felt there wasn't really anything sufficiently challenging for her to do. But before she left us Elaine undertook to find a replacement and eventually selected Pat Smith. Pat's CV included working as production secretary on several studio and location feature films including stuff for Hammer Films. Pat stayed with us from that time on and still did my books till Pearce Studios Ltd closed in 2004. Four or five times a year she drove out to spend a morning bringing my accounts up to date and doing the VAT ... then we would go down to the pub. These had become virtually my only lunch time visits to the pub - not like it was back then !

Maralyn left and there was a spare desk. There were ocassional mentions of looking for another assistant, and Kevin Davies walked in the door. Then in 1980 Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy cropped up. The tale of both Kevin and Hitch Hiker's is expanded in background info on the Hitch-Hikers page.

Dave had by now come up with just about the only viable computer system, but unfortunately (as it would have been perfect for Hitch Hiker's if it had happened a year earlier) the whole deal had to be put on hold because there was no way the installation and learning curve could have been handled at the same time as producing everything needed for the BBC.

Once Hitch-Hiker's was completed in early 1981 the studio returned to something more like normal. This meant a rather less hectic schedule of MOD training and corporate films. It was now possible to resurrect the computer installation.

In a small industrial unit next to the river in Cambridge five techno wizz-kids had developed 3D software called Medusa to service the world of engineering design. The leading 20 storey brain was a guy called Tom Sancha whose brilliant software coding was specifically intended for the 3D design and visualisation of engineering projects for the Mining, Automotive, Aircraft and Architectural industries. The hardware consisted of a fridge-freezer sized Prime computer with several large circuit boards full of chips that together made up 0.25 Mb of RAM and a disk drive draw that needed 2 people to take it in and out. Disk drive storage capacity was only 96 Mb and could take one 12 inch removable disk for archive storage. There was also a very large green screen work station on its own upright base, a two foot square digitising tablet, a teletype printer terminal that acted as the system console, and an A4-ish mechanical plotter that could take Rotring pen head cartridges.

Once the main Prime computer was installed in the middle of its own air conditioned room and the other stuff in one end of the main studio the daunting task began of trying to figure out how to make it do what we needed rather than what it was actually designed for. Huge piles of manuals needed to be ploughed through in a language that seemed pretty foreign to me at the time.

Felt like a pretty daunting undertaking in 1981 but looked promising as the BBC had decided to produce a second series of Hitch-Hikers Guide and we had been commissioned to produce the animated graphics that would be needed. Just as the hardware was all in place and the system up and running we got the news that Douglas Adams had decided to head for Hollywood instead and had waved goodbye to the BBC.

This news left us teetering on the edge of a very deep and dark pit having committed to a massive investment and suddenly no work for it to do to pay for itself. For me it was not just gazing into a deep, dark pit but also in a serious PANIC ! The Studio's running bank overdraft facility was guaranteed by our own home which was of similar value. Not sure what would have happened to the fairly young mortgage also of a similar value if the whole thing had collapsed. I suppose the Building Society and the Bank would have had to squabble over it while my family and I moved out onto the street.

So we desperately needed to put "Brian" to work and started off doing things in a way that was not much more advanced than our familiar production methods. But at least it was now in 3D and we gradually got the hang of defining digital 3D models. The output stages were still pretty labour intensive but there was a lot of our normal type of work coming in and we were joined by a few more team members - Tim Burgess, Theresa Whatley, Shirley Brown, and a friend of Betty's called Daphne, who helped out when we were overwhelmed.

We were using the new computer system more and more on our current work throughput on technical productions and word began to spread. People in Soho who had become aware of us through the exposure that the Hitch-Hiker's Guide graphics had provided started to ask us to do service work for commercials and PR productions. So gradually through 1981-82 we became one of only three computer animation services then commercially available in the UK. One was Imperial College London who were really a research department but offered an external service. Another was an architectural practice who were early adopters of CAD and offered an additional external service. Then there was Pearce Studios Ltd. BBC Computer Graphics were still experimental and had turned down the Hitch-Hiker's Guide graphics in 1980 as being impractical for them at that time.

The digital route we were following continued to develop at quite a speed and for those who are interested the technical aspects are covered in more detail in Digital Story.

Over the next three or four years we refined the computer route to start going direct to 16mm or 35mm film which became a massive short cut and in 1985 we shared a BAFTA with Peter Tupy for the animated bits in "Max Headroom - the movie". Peter's stuff was the animated "computer" Parrot and our stuff really was 3D computer output direct to 35 mm movie film.

In 1983-84 we had a rent increase looming on our half ground floor in Hanwell. It was in fact due to nearly double ! It forced me to think very hard about the future. The options were pretty clear ... go back to being a one-man-band ... or head for Central London and expand. I had been juggling the studio for around 13 years at that point and the relentless demand had left me pretty tired. After Hitch-Hiker's Guide in 1981 my friend Dave had to drive me to Ealing Hospital one morning and after a day on a trolley having all kinds of tests I was finally released with a diagnosis of exhaustion and a reprimand for relying on alcohol, cigarettes, and coffee to power through too many hours ... sometimes two or three days without sleep.

So I decided on the option that might lead to a slightly longer life and prepared to reduce the Pearce Studios staff from what had been fluctuating around 8 to 10 down to just me. I had always felt the weight of responsibility for all the team members so to soften the blow we continued to operate in the studio for a year as an overlap to allow time for everyone to find alternative employment. The mode of operation for that year was that each person worked directly for the client as a freelancer. They could use the studio equipment and stock and film laboratory accounts for which they were invoiced at a nominal agreed rate. They (and I) could of course employ each other as freelancers to work on these jobs of their own.

This seemed to work fairly well and during that year we searched for a suitable place to move our family to which could also accommodate a studio space capable of housing rostrum camera, dark room, air conditioned computer room, and general work space for computer work station and 3 light desks. It was not an easy search and in desperation very nearly committed to something which would have been wrong. We finally found what seemed to be the only candidate that had been on the market for over a year. It needed a LOT of work on it ! In the summer of 1984 we moved in to start doing some of the essential stuff - particularly to put the barn into a suitable state to work from. This required stripping out, insulating, re-cladding inside and out, a new roof, and new electrics and heating. When we were moving the Computer and air conditioning in the tech from the computer company commented that it was the only computer installation he had done with a bird flying around in the roof space !

During 1985 I began to work from the barn as Max Headroom was completing and one of the next computer to 35mm film jobs was for a Water Authority commercial - a spin-off from Max for the same directors - Rocky and Annabel - who ran Cucumber Studios. For a while I still needed to employ freelancers from the ex-Pearce bunch as quite a bit of manual work was still needed to finish off some large-scale jobs. One of those was for Digital Pictures in Soho and there were 5 of us working at one point on that one with at least two having to use a plans chest draw pulled out with a temporary light box on it. Tim Burgess was one of those working here from time to time and Pat continued to turn up regularly to do the books and VAT returns.

Gradually the necessity for manual work reduced and was replaced with almost exclusive computer to film production. Every now and then there were jobs that could not be done in that way. For some I used overnight down-time in video facilities in London - starting work at about 8 at night and finishing at 6 in the morning. For others which needed full lighting and surface rendering I developed a way of exporting 3D model and animation data to an external portable disk drive and taking it to an outfit called Animage in Charlotte Street, near Tottenham Court Road. Horatio would then import the data onto his Bosch FGS-4000 machine and render it out to Beta SP. The Bosch system gained fame in 1985 as the tool used to produce the Dire Straights "Money for Nothing" music video. For a while I toyed with the idea of purchasing one but thankfully held that at arms length.

I say "thankfully" because at this time Horatio at Animage sold me his old Apple Mac FX2 that he wanted to replace. I had been using an old IBM Windows machine hung off the Prime as a terminal which was fairly limited in its capabilities but as I only needed it to receive text data files and write them to an external disk it managed ok. But now I needed to work with fully lit shaded images and I was knocked out with what the Mac could achieve. So I replaced the IBM MS Dos machine with the Mac as a terminal on the prime.

It had no problem with handling the text data file export from the Prime but as a bonus I now had Photoshop as a brand new tool to allow me not to have to book time on Paintbox at facilities houses. I now also had Renderman allowing me to restructure the 3D data exported from Medusa on the Prime to make it possible to do all full solid shaded 3D rendering in-house rather than having to take the data to an external facility. This was a major step forward and I quickly added AfterEffects and a Beta SP video machine with software for output from the Mac to drive the Beta SP machine for pre-roll, single frame record, and post roll.

The upshot of all this was that the Rostrum camera and the darkroom were fairly soon dismantled and the Prime computer and air conditioning were switched off. I offered all the equipment to various art colleges and there was a brief period when the Museum of The Moving Image were excitedly wanting to get hold of a working exhibit of the whole computer to film output route. I offered to set up the entire thing with the Prime, Grey box interface, Rostrum camera, and a looping code to run everything. They saw this as a representative exhibit of a stage in the history of the path from analogue to digital. Unfortunately their parent organisation - the London Science Museum - said "but we already have a Prime computer running our accounts ... why on earth would we need another ?" MOMI replied "but that's not the point at all ! Don't you understand ?" Sadly they didn't understand. The colleges all said "but we have funding for brand new computer controlled rostrum cameras." So everything went out in a skip. Very sad.

Technology kept zooming along at high speed and before long I had 11 Macs running in the studio. 10 of these were running slave versions of RenderMan being sent instructions by the main Mac Pro work station over the local in-house network as a Render farm processing 11 animation frames simultaneously and collecting them back into the main sequence movie file. Although it was a brilliant tool Medusa had died with the Prime Computer and FormZ had taken its place as a modelling tool to export for RenderMan with a batch rendering system I cobbled together with some pretty basic code on the Mac. That system and RenderMan finally succumbed to the Electric Image Animation System, or EIAS, which was brilliant and was very happy accepting FormZ 3D models.

I used a paintbrush and Rotring pen professionally for the last time around 1995. In 2004 Pearce Studios Ltd was closed and I continued to work as a Sole Trader.