Roger Moore’s Requiem is an animation I did when I first became a freelance. To this day listening to the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem sends me back to a stuffy summer in that cramped basement flat in Oval, where I could touch all four walls of my bedroom/office at once.
The idea was to send the animation around to drum up work, but because somebody in an office where I worked knew Roger Moore’s PA, it was sent to him while he was in hospital having had a seizure onstage.
It sounds strange, but the idea behind the animation wasn’t really to do with Roger being dead at all. In fact that’s only occurred to me just now, 8 years later. I’d always imagined that all the creatures with Roger’s face were just impish minions, that if you happened to find yourself in the underworld it would be rather funny if all the creatures you saw had Roger Moore’s face. The use of the word Requiem in the title was simply because the music was Verdi’s Requiem. I didn’t for an instant consider that it might be actually quite startling and offensive for a man who is recovering from a life-threatening episode to see his own Requiem on the internet!
Anyway when Roger saw the animation I got the email back that he was “tickled pink”. And thanks to his PA Gareth Owen and to my good friend (and current Iron Chef presenter) Olly Smith, I found myself a couple of months later on a plane to Monte Carlo to meet and work with Roger Moore himself, the start of a series of meetings which would see me eventually direct the great man in a Christmas cartoon I animated for UNICEF.
You can see more old animation I’ve done here.
