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Similarly, Michael Frayn's play Noises Of not only manages to be about the performance of a
complicated farce called Nothing On , but he throws in an even more complicated backstage
farce, and has them overlapping at the same time. Quite how this was planned defeats me.
My most complicated i lm is Screen Play , and I admit that part of the challenge was the stupidly
complex but necessary nine-minute take. I enjoyed the months planning every movement of
those screens. Originally the screens were to slide from side to side, revealing new vistas, but
reading that the Japanese had pioneered the revolving stage, I complicated things by adding
not just one but a double revolving stage. The revolve gave me too much imagery for one i lm,
and I later designed a stage production of Jekyll and Hyde around a revolve, instantly taking us
from outside to inside, from black to white, from order to chaos. The preparations for Screen
Play involved building a basic revolving stage, endlessly reworking the choreography of the
screens. Plotting the interesting shapes to segue neatly into each other was the hard bit; the
timing happened as I i lmed.
These mental gymnastics are probably something that each stop motion animator secretly
enjoys. We have to, don't we? Otherwise how can we spend so long doing such complicated
stuf for, in real terms, so little? I've been animating for thirty years, but there's probably no
more than twenty hours to show for that. It's probably no surprise that I love jigsaw puzzles
(especially doing them without the picture) and doing Suduko puzzles without making any
notes. Animation requires an obsessive mind set.
Tim Burton's Vincent (Saemi Takahashi).
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