Preparation - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 180

his i ngers and suddenly the light is much brighter and more comprehensive. I justii ed this by
Carte wanting to see his midnight visitors more clearly, and by acknowledging that Carte was
the i rst to install electric light into a public building, as he did for the premiere of Patience . In a
subsequent premiere, the chorus girls were dressed with tiny lights in their headdresses. These
operas and their staging were not dry and dusty at the time, so it saddens me that they have
that reputation.
Colour
Colour is an element that the artii ciality of stop motion lets us exploit. As invariably our
i lms are shorter than we would like, colour coding characters or having obvious palettes for
certain scenes and situations can certainly help the narrative. Animation is not about real
life, but a shorthand to things we recognise or i nd credible, however fantastic. I have always
been thorough about plotting the use of colour, and I i nd it tricky nowadays that my most
comfortable colour, blue, has to be limited through so much blue-screen work. Blue can make
life harder in the postproduction.
As I give myself a discipline in storytelling and sets, I seldom use a specii c colour because I
happen to like it. An obvious example would be to dress Romeo and Juliet with the Capulets
in yellows and the Montagues in blue, and only mixing their colours as the families are united
in their grief. A recent production of King Lear saw the opening burst forth in a riot of golds
and dazzling rich colours, all l attering the eye as the court l atters the king, but as Lear lost
his reason the colours faded away to almost monochrome. In animation, where everything is
accentuated, we can have fun with using colour tricks like this. Rather obviously, the costume
for Rigoletto was of two colours, split down the middle, immediately expressing the two
sides of his nature. I deliberately plot the colours to say something about the characters, the
narrative, the emotions, the mood and the geography. In both Achilles and Screen Play , red is
only seen with the death of a major character. Water features heavily in both i lms as a theme,
and these scenes are saturated with blue, a colour I i nd calming and comforting.
Costume
Having been commissioned to make Next , my i rst consideration, knowing how long these
things take, was to start thinking about Shakespeare himself. All the portraits were painted
after his death, usually as him in mature years, but there is a perceived image of him that
would have been perverse to ignore. I worked with sculptors and puppet-makers who would
later develop into Mackinnon Saunders. We gathered much Shakespearean imagery, mainly
the Flowers portrait, but the sculptor also thought to put an element of me in it. Even before
this, essentially my i rst i lm, I had a reputation for being somewhat theatrical, and it seemed
appropriate to blend some of my features into those of Shakespeare. This was one
of the most elegant and sophisticated puppets the Mackinnon Saunders guys had
made so far.
There was little point in designing complicated mouth mechanics, as Shakespeare
did not speak, but I wanted a hint of smile, and achieved this through a tiny paddle
under the skin. This was smooth and subtle, and although he only smiles obviously