Shaping Ideas - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 120

whether she has followed him, contrary to the condition of her survival. At that moment, the
story would stop and out of the shadows arrived the chorus, who proceeded to act out six
Greeks myths as cautionary tales, all involving characters looking where they should not have
looked. Figures such as Acteon and Diana, Echo and Narcissus, Pandora, Priapus, Daphne and
Apollo echoed the main plot, and would have been acted out around the frozen Orpheus,
challenging him to make the right decision. As they fell back into the darkness, he would come
alive again, only to make the wrong decision and lose Eurydice once more. This seemed an
interesting structure, capturing the nature of a chorus, but a detailed treatment came in at
about twenty-i ve minutes, and Channel 4 was giving me eleven.
The fl oor plan of the Greek theatre Epidaurus was the basis for the set of Achilles .
This caused a major and reluctant rethink, but I still wanted to play with a chorus, and was
hesitant to move away from the other myths, some of which were excitingly visual and bizarre,
and hadn't been done in animation before. The remit to produce something challenging,
unique and thought provoking made the Orpheus story a bit too straight. I started to i nd
something racier that could push a few animation boundaries. The confused sexuality of
Achilles seemed perfect, but this was a complicated story, and one lacking any obvious
animation opportunities. You can't mention Achilles and Patroclus without mentioning Paris,
Helen, Hector, Agamemnon and other characters who of er parallels and historical background.
To do this in eleven minutes seemed worrying. Before writing the script, I wondered how to
focus on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus without the others getting in the way.
This intense physical relationship developed into the focus of the i lm, rather than any more
Harryhausenesque aspects of the Greek myths. Intimacy had not really been treated seriously
with puppets. Much as the stories of Paris and Helen are interesting, this i lm was not about
them. Each i lm needs a personal perspective, and here the perspective is Achilles.
This is where the design solved a narrative problem and provided a pleasing visual.
Other than the story of someone incapable of expressing love, and of someone
who expressed too much, I wanted the i lm to use the conventions of Greek art
and drama, much as I used certain Japanese conventions in Screen Play . Grateful
of an excuse to research museums and topics, it was obvious that the main
representation of human i gures was either beautiful pale statues or the glorious