Getting Moving - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 199

have time to think through what you are doing, adding those extra touches that make it magical. Whatever
our physical ability we can become graceful dancers or tough fi ghters or Andy Pandy or Shaun the Sheep.
DS - We've found that its sense of tangibility gives it a different emotional response to either 2D or CGI.
Seeing the craftsmanship on the screen, in the form of paint strokes or fi ngerprints, does subconsciously
remind the audience that this is hand made and that adds something. When it's working well there is
something in stop frame that resonates with people that doesn't with other forms. Having said that, the
fi lm must be engaging in the fi rst place.
PRW/MG - Stop motion can give a feeling of being more real, more three-dimensional, even if the
characters do not look particularly real - for example in Paul Berry's Sandman , which was very
frightening. In some cases stop motion can be more real than drawn animation, but not always. Stop
motion is more real than CGI, much of which has no soul. Most CGI characters are visually grotesque
with a kind of 'grotesqueness' that is ugly and bland (lifeless) rather than character driven.
Scale
Ray Harryhausen's Cyclops from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad : a small puppet
looking huge (Saemi Takahashi).
Among the many things we ask of an audience is to accept that a small, twelve-
inch-high model is not only living, but is meant to be many feet high, sometimes
several dozen feet high, as with King Kong. To create this all-important illusion
is not just a matter of blowing up the image to the appropriate size. It is an