Production - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 278

In a rehearsal room, if a performance is unsuitable you can try it again, and it's gone.
Unfortunately, your work, and your bad work, is up there on the screen to be run and rerun,
each time hurting more, your inadequacy growing. For the i rst week of a production, everyone
crams in to watch, and there is polite applause, but schedules take over and interest wanes,
and only a few people come. This anguish was all of my own, as the indif erence could be
caused by everyone else blindly focusing on their bits, the lighting, the costume and the set.
I would be happy never to sit through rushes again. It was worse than exam results read out
to the class. If I wasn't a perfectionist, didn't care so much and didn't worry about every frame,
then rushes would be a doddle. There have been moments, however, when rushes have
brought spontaneous rounds of hugely rewarding genuine applause. After all this time, I'm not
surprised by my own rushes, as I know exactly what they will look like. It wasn't always so.
Watching rushes: the Pepper's ghost effect from Gilbert and Sullivan .
Do the rushes ever surprise you?
JD - Sometimes, unfortunately, but not too often.
TB - When I improvise on the set, and see it in rushes, and it works, that's very satisfying.
KD - Yes, it makes me want to re-do it!
RC - In traditional and CG, no, because they are different in terms of process and refi nement. In stop
motion, yes, because even when I have 'hit' what I was trying to do, I fi nd that being somewhat of a
perfectionist, I wished I could just tweak the timing or pose a bit more.
DC - I've seen the shot a hundred times by then so it's only things like lighting and colour I couldn't see
in the grainy black and white monitor image that surprise me.
AW - Very often surprise. I don't like to watch rushes too much as I become too conscious of the shot's
fl aws.