Apart from the early pioneer efforts of Lew Cook, animation was virtually non-existent in Portland until the 1950s when several engineer/technicians built serviceable stands and began to animate local commercials. Vintage Portlanders may recall the ads for Staceys Cleaners, Equitable Savings, and Big O Tires.
The individual behind much of the work was a radio engineer turned filmmaker/inventor named Frank Hood.
Hood was an engineer by training. He was hired in the late Forties as the 24th employee of a start-up company called Tektronix. In the early 1950s Frank talked his boss into letting him make training films for the company everyone in California was doing it. He quickly tired of the turn around time for sending his footage to Hollywood and set out to build his own processing machine in the basement of his home on N.E. 13th and Roselawn. By day Frank was a Tektronix employee and by night and weekend a filmmaker and lab technician. He dubbed his basement enterprise Teknifilm Lab.
Excerpt from Rose Bond’s excellent essay about Portland animation history.
This post brought to you by Oregon Cartoon Institute.
1 response so far ↓
1 Rockaday Richie and the Queen of the Hop, aka Stark Raving Mad (1974)/Lost film | Oregon Movies, A to Z // Feb 4, 2012 at 3:11 pm
[...] Rockaday Richie was written and produced by Don Gronquist and directed by George Hood, son of Frank Hood, the founder of the all important Teknifilm Lab. [...]
Leave a Comment