Ideas and Storytelling - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 98

I love playing with structure and watching how it works in great pieces. Watching the dullest of
i lms or plays is never a waste of time, as the mechanics of how things happen often gives me
more pleasure. I marvel at how clever twists are introduced or how back-stories are revealed,
or how a sentence is structured to give away so much information but still sound like natural
dialogue. I'm not sure that my i lms are great examples of any classic ideas about structure, but
they do l ow and not a frame is wasted. I like to throw in unexpected narrative twists, but I am
not consciously following any recognised formats or genre tricks.
Sondheim's musical Sunday in the Park with George imagines the painting of Seurat's, Sunday
afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte, giving every detail a new perspective (Saemi
Takahashi).
My favourite structure is an obvious change of perspective to make the usual unusual, or the
familiar look fresh. In J.B. Priestley's play Time and the Conways , he shows us a family innocently
celebrating, with all their hopes and ambitions. Without warning the play jumps to after the
war, to see how these ambitions have been crushed. Act three takes us back to where we
were, and how hollow these celebrations seem, now we, the audience, know something the
characters do not. The audience having secret knowledge is a prime device for tension. For
twenty centuries audiences have screamed at Oedipus not to seduce Jocasta, alone knowing
that she is his mother. Another favourite structure is Sondheim's Sunday in the Park
with George , where the audience watches the painting of Seurat's masterpiece,
seeing every little detail echoing the artist's life. Every hitherto innocent detail is
now teaming with imagined signii cance. In a daring moment, Sondheim twists
the perspective and we see the artist's life from the character's perspective. In
animation, the i lms of Paul Driessen often show the same event from dif erent
perspectives at the same time, and see their subsequent dif erent meanings.