High Falls Film Festival - Teresa Drilling, Wallace and Grommit Animator

R.I.T. Graduate Teresa Drilling

At Coffee with the filmmaker on Friday morning I met up with Teresa Drilling of Portland, Oregon, an R.I.T. Honors Graduate in Graphic Design and Painting. Drilling has just completed her work on her third feature film.

Drilling’s stop-motion short, The Owl and the Pussycat garnered a successful festival run. HBO then picked it up for a two year run as an intermission short, it was then picked up by a distributor and led to a job offer in NYC.

In 1987 Drilling moved to Portland to join Vinton Studios. Drilling’s tenure at Vinton’s continued for 14 years where she became one of Vinton's senior staff and one of its principle mentors.

In 1999 she traveled to Britain to work with Aardman Features on Chicken Run as a Key Animator.
Drilling worked on A Claymation Christmas Celebration, where she brought skating walruses to life. Drilling animated the snowman in Elf and made Barbie dance in Dance! Workout with Barbie (1991).

Drilling received an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation in 1991 for her animation work on the Claymation Comedy of Horrors where she designed and animated the drunken skeleton, Famine.

Drilling has been an animator for twenty years and has just returned from Bristol, England where she completed her work on Wallace and Grommit. The project took 18-19 months to complete with a staff of 250.

Drilling now works as a freelance animator.

On Sunday at the Little Theatre from Noon-1:30 High Falls Film Festival will feature a talk by Drilling:
WALLACE, GROMIT, CHICKENS, RAISINS AND ME: TERESA DRILLING, STOP-MOTION ANIMATOR.