Getting Personal - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 77

I was enormously inventive and overcomplicated with these cut-outs, even planning camera
moves and shimmering rel ections for the swans: one scene featured 122 moving parts. These
cut-outs were detailed, but drawing has never been my strength. Surprisingly, I'd not planned
any music, nor had I timed the i lm or even storyboarded it. With all the information stored in
my head. I sweated away, loving the process of touching everything. The camera was placed on
a tripod above a rather large breadboard, and things were manipulated underneath. When the
rushes arrived (what a misnomer: it took about two weeks to see the rushes) I was pleasantly
surprised with the movement and the timing. Working in the theatre, timing cues to the rise
of an audience's laugh or the beat in an actor's line gave me a good sense of rhythm and
how long to hold something, but working in animation with everything so deconstructed,
it's easy to get the timing wrong. It takes quite a skill, peculiar to animators, to time a laugh
that may take a day to shoot but in ef ect runs for a few seconds. One frame too many can
mistime a gag.
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas I met Mark Hall in Pitlochry and since the i lm was almost an
audition, after our meeting I didn't exactly lose interest in the i lm, but I had made a point and
The gorgeous Chorlton and Zoomer.
the i lm never reached its spectacular conclusion. My true love never got her last
gifts … but she didn't do badly. Nor did I. I'll admit to cheating a bit, as while it was
easy to see how laying eggs, gold rings and turtle doves might be useful, I never
worked out a signii cance for a partridge in a pear tree. Perhaps it was the gift of
appreciating the absurd. Perhaps she would become an animator.