Animation Early Days at GTV9 — Interview with Vic Anastasi
In the early 1960s, the Australian “animation industry” existed mainly to support production of television commercials. GTV9 in Melbourne established an in-house animation department circa 1960 under the title of John Wilson Productions, later to become known as Fanfare Films. It was based at GTV9’s Bendigo Street facility (the former piano and tomato sauce factory).
Vic Anastasi was the animation cameraman at Fanfare Films, a role he took on after starting at GTV9 as a “stills” photographer. Vic left GTV9 circa 1964/65, to work with Denzil Howson at the newly established television station AMV4 in Albury.
Nearly 35 years later, in 1998, Denzil recorded an interview with Vic Anastasi about those early days of the GTV9 Animation Department. The interview was recorded at Vic’s home in Albury.
Topics covered in this interview include:
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Establishment of John Wilson Productions, later Fanfare Films.
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The process of animation and the work of an animation cameraman.
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Different skills present in the animation department.
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Example of challenging animation: the Shell commercial for cinema release; “The Age” commercial using in-camera matte.
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Interludes for animation of “The Adventures of Freddo the Frog”.
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Vic’s later work in Albury at AMV4 and subsequently with the Army audio-visual unit at Bonegilla.
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The idea for a documentary about the WWII Battle for Malta.
Listen Now: Click the play button on the audio player:
Download: Click here to download an mp3 (48mB).
An article from Australian Geographic says this about “The Adventures of Freddo the Frog”: “In 1962 Freddo became Australia’s first animated cartoon TV character when the Freddo the Frog series, sponsored by MacRobertson’s, appeared on Channel Nine. Created by artist Gus McLaren, he was joined by Drongo, Flash Jack, Kanga and Wocka.”
References about “The Adventures of Freddo the Frog”:
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Episode of the series on youtube.
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An article about “The Adventures of Freddo the Frog” in Australian Geographic.
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An article about the Freddo TV series and the voice actors.
You can Vic Anastasi’s account of his time working with Denzil Howson at GTV9 and AMV4 here in the Tributes section of this website.
Technical Notes on the Tape Transfer and Audio Clean Up
These files were transferred from the cassette tape on which they were originally recorded. The original recording had quite a bit of background tape noise and some 50Hz hum, plus over-modulation distortion.
The interview was also split across two sides of the cassette. Thankfully there was overlap across the two sides.
The tape transfer and initial cleanup process was conducted in 2007:
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Transfer at 24 bit 44khz from cassette using Sansui cassette deck into Tascam US-122 audio interface.
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Denzil’s short intro, recorded separately from the interview (probably in his home studio), was split off into a separate file for processing.
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The Hum filter in iZotope RX was used to remove the 50Hz hum.
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The Reduce Noise filter in iZotope RX was used to reduce the background noise — which included tape noise plus some mechanical noise from the tape recorder and/or the environment. This worked very well, however it left a few audible artifacts in the quite passages between speaking — e.g. some of the breathing sounds are a little “coney”. But overall the converted audio is much cleaner than the original transfer.
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Normalised the levels of each part to about –0.5dB peak.
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Aligned the two parts of the interview and used a very fast crossfade to splice them together.
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Rendered the completed interview to a single .aiff file.
In 2024, using the more advanced digital cleanup tools now available, I was able to use the De-Reverb filter in iZotope RX to remove most of the room reverberation, which makes for a much more pleasant listening experience. Unfortunately not much can be done to fix the analog distortion present in the original recording.