Preparation - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 161

The Screen Play wedding screens part to reveal the wedding itself.
but my tricks were with the screens themselves. This took some planning, and I'm particularly
satisi ed with the scene in the dead garden where the Recitor reminds the girl she is to marry
the Samurai. The open stage is full of dead l owers but no screens. I needed the reminder of
the Samurai to be instant. A screen sliding on would kill the impact, and it couldn't just appear.
I drew a thin vertical black line on the back wall, for just one frame. On the second, it was a
piece of black tape hanging in the space where the screen was due to appear. Then a thicker
piece, and i nally the screen itself edge on, its thickness only just wider than the black line. The
next frame had the real screen revolving towards the camera, until it was face-on, showing
the Samurai. As the screen came edge-on again, a second screen was hidden behind it, and
as it continued a double screen was revealed, now with the wedding dress spread over the
two panels. After a beat the two screens slid apart, revealing a blue sky being painted frame
by frame over the old yellow one. I couldn't stand by watching paint dry, and there are a few
l ickers as the colours dry or I altered the shape I was trying to anticipate. Also revealed behind
was the girl now wearing the wedding dress; we had seen her running across the stage just one
frame before, with a bit of costume trailing for a few frames as she is seen behind the screens.
Modern techniques would make this easy to stage, but the ef ect of the scene l owing smoothly
from the Recitor reminding the girl of her marriage by seeing the Samurai on the screen, to the
illustration of the dress, and then the girl in the dress itself at the wedding, works
because of its real physicality. This is highly indulgent, but great fun to conceive.
This could have been done with cuts, but it wouldn't have had the lyricism, in the
way that music often segues from one theme to another. Transformation scenes on
stage always impress me, not just because of their technical trickery but because
of how they move the action along, telescoping it, making visual links between the
overlapping images.