Production - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 288

Apart from the prestige, the budget and the facilities, I would love to direct a feature to be able
to develop a more intertwining subplot and more parallels. Short i lms and series are limited
(although this can be their strength as well) as every frame you do has to contribute to the
main situation. I hated killing Achilles as there was so much more I wanted to do with him.
In shorts there is no time to wander of for a dif erent perspective on the main story, and with
series everything has to be self-contained, as little can develop from one episode to another.
There's no arc for the characters. But with a ninety-minute feature there is time for much
more complex situations and character developments, and more tangential action. I would
love to be able to play with rhythm more, teasing the audience, rather than having to dive
straight in. With a feature you can digress, spend more time setting up the atmosphere, and
have shots that do not always feature the characters. I worry when storyboarding a series shot
that does not feature a main character. It is rare to have time to stand back from the plot or
the characters. This is all great discipline, and you learn to make absolutely everything count,
i nding ways to condense two plot points into one shot. My own i lms probably take this to
an extreme and are subsequently very dense, as so much needs to be conveyed. My i lms take
a certain amount of learning to read, but I don't apologise for that. I expect the audience to
concentrate as I expect to concentrate when watching a i lm. I tend to make i lms that squash
a quart into a pint pot, and hope the audience sees enough of what's happening to stay
interested, and keep them thinking afterwards. I would not want to make a i lm where little
lingered after the lights came up.
I wish I had the skill of such i lm-makers as Michael Dudok de Wit, in whose i lms, especially
my favourite, The Monk and The Fish (1994), so much is created with so little. A simple shadow
creates a credible geography and a black line becomes a horizon. The enigmatic story of a
monk catching a i sh is superi cially no more than that, but because the drawings are so simple
and everything is about suggestion, the viewer's mind is full of its own meanings. The action
progressively takes on a lyrical surreal quality and the ending is simply uplifting. The animation
consists of few in-betweens, relying on stunningly synchronised key drawings. The music,
based on Corelli, is as much a dramatic part of the i lm as the animation and design. Everything
works together, but it is its deep simplicity that is so powerful, and I wonder whether that
is achievable in stop motion. The very weightiness of the puppets, the pure physicality and
texture of them would probably i ght with any lightness. To have replicated The Monk and the
Fish in stop motion, frame by frame, simply would not have worked. The scene where the monk
is jumping in great leaps and bounds sees the animation at its most economical, but also its
most evocative and moving. Stop motion animators would i ght hard not to put in more detail.
My favourite scene: Hoth AT-AT attack from The Empire Strikes
Back - Paul Campion
After the excitement of Star Wars , the anticipation of a second fi lm was huge. By the time The Empire
Strikes Back came out I'd read everything on special effects (back then special effects were still 'special',
the techniques used were much more guarded and less understood by the general public); although I had
a basic understanding of how bluescreen shooting and optical compositing worked, the process of stop
motion was something this thirteen-year-old was very familiar with, so I was very excited to hear that
there was a lot of stop motion animation in The Empire Strikes Back .