Getting Personal - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 80

TB - I plunged into it, although I did think about what I wanted the character to do. I dressed a GI Joe
doll to resemble a desert sheikh, holding two swords, standing inside a tent. He lifted his head and began
to dance with the swords. That animation turned out to be some of the smoothest stop motion I've done,
probably because I poured a lot of TLC into it, taking my time, and thinking about the movements. I did
this around when The Golden Voyage of Sinbad came out, so I assume that the sheikh was inspired from
Ray's Kali sequence.
KD - Nope, went straight in for the Oscar nomination. I made a fi lm about a dog who tried to commit
suicide from being bored. It was a great little fi lm, shot in twos, but I was proud of it. I nearly went for the
person who deleted it. Plonker!
RC - I plunged in. I did little scenes fi rst, to learn what I could do. I fi lmed in my basement. The old lights
only had a four-hour life so my mom would yell down every hour and I'd open the lens a half-stop.
I knew nothing about practical things, such as a simple lamp extension cord not being able to handle a
set of four lights and my little rear projector. I blew all the fuses one night. God was watching over me
that night. It was exciting to see the footage get better over time.
DC - I set my fi gure the task of building a telephone in three different architectural styles. The phone was
my scale so the architect must have been from a different and tiny world. I plunged straight in with only
the knowledge that 'you move it a little bit then take a frame!' and discovered all the limitations of my
puppet, my set, my super eight camera, using daylight, etc. The fi nished piece was a mad three-minute
dash in various daylight phases. He moved like the old black-and-white fi lms, but you could tell what
was happening and everyone was impressed by the magic I'd created. My toy had come to life and built a
sort of telephone thing!
AW - After watching other animators I took an old Semafor puppet and I made a one-minute
thirty-second shot. The director said (in Polish) 'Oh bugger, you're quite good' and accepted me onto
his team.
SB - I tried to make a fi lm with Phil Gray. It was frustrating. It didn't go well.
KP - My fi rst animation on fi lm was a 16 mm fi lm-making exercise at university in 1995. I directed a fi lm
called Visit to the Art Museum , which was live-action with cut-out sequences of paintings coming to life,
infl uenced by Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animation. I had a natural sense of timing from the get-go,
but all the animation was a bit overexposed. My fi rst clay animation was just simple tabletop clay snakes
interacting to form letters for a title sequence. I was much more pleased with the results and was inspired
to keep going with it.
TD - I plunged straight in, working intuitively, drawing on my early years of posing clay. It was a rather
crude clay dragon waking up and eating a ball that rolls into frame. It turned out all right. I got enough
positive satisfaction from the results to have another go. It's important to have positive experiences
in the beginning. That keeps it fun, which sharpens focus and encourages taking on further challenge
and complexity. I'd overloaded myself in the early stages of other creative endeavours before trying
animation, and had a string of half-fi nished projects trailing behind me, which bothered me. I may have
instinctively not wished to add another undone effort to that string. I was carrying a heavy course load at
the time which sort of saved me from myself. I didn't allow myself to get overly embroiled in detail, which
I probably would've done if I felt I'd more time.