Smoke and Mirrors - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 3

1

Smoke and
Mirrors

I have long since been enthralled by magicians. I watched the charming David Nixon on TV
(who introduced the glove puppet Basil Brush to the unwitting world), and loved the ease of
his performance. I was never keen on the over-glitzy presentation of Siegfried and Roy (their
magic inseparable from a distracting camp element), or the smarm of David Blaine, as these
performers tend to have too much show, with plastic assistants and unnecessary technology,
detracting from the trick itself. A magician's audience know that a woman is never likely to
be actually sawn in half; they like to l irt with believing but no more. There is a complicity.
If a woman was sawn in half, the whole event would lose its point and the woman her life!
We are willing to be tricked and fooled, and the more fooled we are the more satisfying
the experience. What makes the trick better is the element of doubt, where the audience's
perception of what is real and what is not is pushed to an uncomfortable limit.

This is like countless TV detective shows and Agatha Christie novels: if we knew whodunnit
on page one, there would be little point in reading on. The fun is trying to work out what
happened or who did what to whom. We want to be tricked and gulled, and misdirected, with
the i nal unmasking of the murderer bringing a complex feeling of being angry for not having
seen it coming and a glorious fuli lment at having been so deliciously deceived.

Having watched dozens of magic shows, there is one inescapable moment essential to every
trick: there has to be a moment of misdirection, and it's in this split second that the mechanics
of the trick happens unseen. Misdirection could be the puf of smoke as a genie appears on
stage, or the shutting of a cabinet, or the elaborate swishing of a black cape, or the pulling of
a ubiquitous curtain, or the blindfolding of the eyes, or the closing of a i st, or the sealing of
an envelope, or the shul e of a pack of cards or a glamorous assistant innocently tinkering
with something. There is an instant when something is concealed from the audience, and the
magician's art is to make this moment as brief and as subtle as possible. Usually it involves
some element of black or darkness, where the trick is able to be carried out unseen.

The animation trick
For animators, that moment of misdirection is there twenty-i ves frames a second (in the UK
at least). It's a black frame that does not register with the audience, and allows the animator,
acting as both magician and glamorous assistant, to step in and tinker with the puppets,
rearranging everything before stepping out again, as if nothing had happened. The audience
hasn't seen us, but they see the trick. The puppet appears to have moved.