Oscar-winning creative studio Framestore shared the sad news this week that Mike Milne, a six-time Emmy Award winner who helped usher in a new era of computer graphics in film and television. He was also the great-nephew of English writer A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Milne formed Framestore’s first computer animation team in 1992, paving the way for the company’s position as a leading studio for creature and character animation. He was a key part of the creative team that brought to life Walking with Dinosaurs — a landmark piece of British television that celebrates its 25th anniversary and was recently announced for renewal by the BBC and PBS.
“Mike was a true one-off,” recalls Framestore co-founder and Chairman Sir William Sargent. “His enthusiasm was contagious, and he was a never-ending source of knowledge, experience and creativity. His work and his vision helped set the standard for our animation work and placed the craft at the core of what we do as a company. His influence can still be felt across the visual effects industry, from the techniques and technologies Walking With Dinosaurs helped establish to the computer animation degrees offered by U.K. universities, for which Mike was a passionate advocate.”
Prior to embarking on his pioneering career in VFX, Milne worked variously as an artist, graphic designer and park ranger on a remote island. In the 1970s, he became fascinated with computer programming, working from textbooks to learn the underlying principles before taking night classes at Middlesex Polytechnic. An early adopter of computer animation, he was quick to see the potential for merging live action with CG. He won a D&D Award for his work on the iconic, irreverent British puppet comedy Spitting Image before making the move to Framestore in 1992.
Framestore’s animation team grew under his stewardship, and 1999 saw the release of the game-changing Walking with Dinosaurs miniseries, which brought Hollywood-grade VFX to the small screen for the first time. This award-winning success led to further Walking with… projects, the BBC’s 2002 Hound of the Baskervilles adaptation and work on the critically and commercially successful Primeval. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Bournemouth University in 2002 and, in 2008, received the Royal Television Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his outstanding contribution to the industry.
“A quarter of a century later it’s easy to forget just how groundbreaking Walking with Dinosaurs was,” noted Fiona Walkinshaw, the studio’s CEO of Film & Episodic. “When you stop and think that the first Jurassic Park film featured something like six minutes of CG, and there was Mike and the team making a six-part, three-hour miniseries in the style of a nature documentary … it’s almost inconceivable. That work really pushed the envelope for visual effects, and many of the show’s innovations are now viewed as industry standard. Mike was a huge part of Framestore’s history and development, but more than anything he was a good, interesting and really clever person who it was always a pleasure to work with and learn from.”
Milne’s work on Walking with Dinosaurs won the Primetime Emmy Awards for both Outstanding Special Visual Effects and Outstanding Animated Program in 2000, as well as Innovation honors from the BAFTA TV Awards and the RTS Awards and a Peabody Award (one of the dinos even graced the cover of TIME). His list of Emmys grew with additional Animated Program wins for follow-ups Allosaurus: A Walking with Dinosaurs Special, Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, Chased by Dinosaurs and Before the Dinosaurs, as well as nominations for Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real and Secrets of the Deep as well as a VFX nomination for Walking with Prehistoric Beasts. Milne also received a nomination for TV VFX from the 2004 VES Awards for Sea Monsters: A Walking with Dinosaurs Trilogy.
“You always knew where you were with Mike, because he was painfully honest and true to what he believed and felt, always acknowledging and valuing people and their abilities,” Global Director of Animation Michael Eames shared. “He had boundless and contagious enthusiasm to find the best way to achieve something, and if he couldn’t do it himself, he’d find the best people he could to do it with him. He was truly visionary in the way he went about creating the Walking With Dinosaurs series, which paved the way for Framestore to become the animation powerhouse it is now. He was, ultimately, the reason I came to Framestore.”
Framestore will hold a memorial for Milne in the autumn.
Obituary information provided by Framestore.
