Widening the Scope - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 322

blockbusting comedy will invariably win the audience vote. Audiences want to be entertained,
and many festival audiences are particularly quick to show their appreciation, or lack of it.
The packed auditoriums of Annecy ring with boos and slow hand claps just as often as the
audiences cheer to the rafters. There's no surer or more raw way of i nding out whether your
i lm works. Annecy is an amazing experience and has grown to huge proportions. As with
any festival, you are overwhelmed with trying to work out how to see as many programmes
as possible, as well as trying to decode the booking system. Annecy usually has several
auditoriums scattered over the gorgeous town, but its strength is also its weakness; namely,
the lake itself. The town has such a stunning setting and after too many hours of watching
i lms that lake is a magnet. By day three you i nd the i lm-makers in a l otilla of boats, capsizing
with picnics, or skinny-dipping in the mountain fresh water, but all having overdosed on
i lms or questions from journalists. With animators being cooped up for most of the year, this
is a tremendous location to meet other i lm-makers, and Annecy treats the i lms with huge
respect, with countless meetings and workshops, and usually a breathtaking party on the lake
or in a chateau. I have great memories of Annecy, especially sitting out on the lawns giving a
masterclass to twenty or so animators, being unable to concentrate because of the distracting
scenery, and the gourmet picnic. Stuttgart also holds a great festival, and a very intense one,
with all the activities focused in the same area, complete with a wonderful old wooden circus
tent as a meeting place. Hiroshima, Espinho, Bradford, Liepzig … oh, too many great festivals
and tremendous fellow animators and excited audiences. Festivals are a great perk of this
business, and a massive release after the intense process of making a i lm.
I have often taken puppets with me, or festivals have hosted an exhibition. Nothing draws
the crowds like a collection of puppets. Their physicality has provoked some genuinely
rewarding conversations, usually from people coming up to me in the street, away from the
screenings. They often appear clutching a bag which contains their puppet, desperate for any
practical help and appreciation. I'm happy to talk about puppets for hours, especially when
accompanied by some of Annecy's unbelievably delicious pastries. The immediate reaction
is to touch the puppets, to move them, to be part of the tactile experience that we enjoy as
animators. This reaching out and touching is often out of curiosity, but it's also about wanting
a direct connection with the puppet or character. With a stop motion puppet, especially for
short i lms, there is generally only one version of the character, making it unique. Audiences
often struggle to relate this lifeless object they are prodding to what they've seen living on
screen. There is some melancholy as well, as there is the puppet, its work done, spent, but still
containing all that experience. Puppets have life, but they must also have death.
Unlike the marionettes, the glove puppets, the animatronic puppets, and to some extent
the clay puppet with its visible i ngerprints, stop motion puppets sit there with no obvious
intervention. There is still a mystery about them, about how they move and perform.
A frequent comment is 'yes, but where is the real one?' Etiquette stops some people, but most
just want to touch, hold and photograph, smiling in response to a physical experience that
I don't think a keyboard, under similar circumstances, can produce. A drawing on
a previously blank sheet of paper of a recognisable character can raise the same
smile. From nothing, there is now a character, and a unique personalised one.
Festivals unite all manner of people through the shared passion of animation. I
love watching homemade puppets being delicately unwrapped, but I'm often
saddened that people's resources do not match their obvious enthusiasm. The