It all started with an 8mm Bell & Howell movie camera...

After having seen my grandmother's (Alice Haas) home movies when I was ten, I asked her if film was still available for the camera. It turns out it was, so I bought some and a wannabe filmmaker was born. After initially experimenting by taking home movies of my own, I discovered the camera's greatest secret. It could shoot single frame exposures, as in ANIMATION!

I quickly began experiments in stop motion by animating anything I had on hand, toys, household objects, even grandma herself. (She was very tolerant). Ultimately this resulted in my first attempts at filming my own drawings to make very crude 2D animated films.

As I grew into a young adult, I pursued other interests career wise, but always returned to filmmaking and animation as a creative outlet. Eventually the movie cameras and film was replaced with video cameras and an Amiga computer. My first project in computer animation was Benny Bear.

This was an ambitious if not primitive first outing for me in computer animation. Making an 85 minute feature film by yourself is no small task. I learned a lot making it and it turned out as best as could be expected with my experience level at the time.

Fast forward several years and advancements in the technology and tools led me into a new phase of experimentation. Armed with a Wacom tablet and Toon Boom animation software, the first of five, twenty minute Scratch and Sniff episodes was produced. This led to creating and publishing my own Roku channels where over the course of a few years I produced over seven hours of animation, puppet and live action shows. All of this while holding down a full-time day job in I.T.

Benny was made by scanning the drawings into the Amiga and then played back in real time and recording the animation on video tape (this was the early 90's). This led to experiments with 3D animation via LightWave 3D. "The Dalmarian Chronicles" was the resulting project I completed seven year later in 2003.

As I reached the end of my I.T. career and retired, I founded Perpetual Motion Studios in order to continue my passion for animation. Scratch and Sniff has since found distribution on various streaming platforms and I was still using LightWave 3D to produce short films.

The first "post" retirement project is the feature film "Time Keeper".

As this project wraps up, and I begin planning my next animated feature, I'm ever mindful of my grandmother's love, inspiration, and support all those years ago that started me on this journey. Thank you grandma, this is all because of you.

- Jeff Haas

Perpetual Motion Studios is one man, indie animation studio located in Central Ohio. I founded the studio in 2021 after retiring from a 26+ year I.T. career. I decided to pursue my lifelong love of animation and filmmaking full-time, so if you're interested in more of the gory details, read on! - Jeff Haas

contact@perpetualmotionstudios.com