Evolving into Stop Motion - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 15

FL - Those great monsters, my eyes overloaded with those fantastic images. I wish I had that sensation
again. I actually did, a few times. …
DS - It appealed because I didn't know how it happened. The fact that the sets had a more tangible
nature appealed to me more than those of the 2D animated fi lms as they were clearly a different
technique
AC - No, I had no thoughts about how it was made, it was totally believable.
Texture
For mainly economical reasons, short i lms look like an endangered species these days, but
ideas for such i lms keep tumbling out of my head at an alarming rate. I have thought about
using whatever computer method is accessible, just so the ideas don't wither away. But I
look at Flash and it doesn't excite me. I have seen many brilliant i lms in Flash, some with
deep characterisations, beautiful designs, with witty or provocative ideas, and tremendous
storytelling, but I cannot seem to structure my ideas to the particular qualities of Flash. I have
a huge pile of cels at home waiting to be used, but I can't get started. There shouldn't be a
blockage, as I consider myself a storyteller and should jump at any chance of making a i lm,
whatever the medium. I am not short of ideas, but what's stopping me is one word: texture.
Or several words: texture, richness, space, depth, movement, shadow, lighting, physicality.
They are all qualities stop motion has in abundance. It's about textures that move in a credible
spatial environment. I am not a fan of l at colours, or shapes that exist without shadows, with
little contact with their environment. Richness engages me.
I'm not sure I'd seen anything so beautiful or atmospheric as the backgrounds for Bambi , but
at the age of six, I was aware that the characters were l at by comparison and often had little
shadow or texture. I understood it was a necessary result of cel animation, but I still felt a
little cheated. The characters did not seem to exist in the same space as the backgrounds. The
other moment that upset me (other than that scene) was when the skunk meets the female
skunk, and changes into a stif , sharp-edged version of himself, and an obvious blush travels
up his body with a clear edge. It broke for me the credible convention (if talking animals can
be credible … well they were mostly on all fours) they had set up in the i lm. To have animals
talking, and with unnatural proportions, was i ne, as they were still animals, wonderfully drawn
with roundness and softness, but this gag with the skunk just didn't i t the rest of the i lm. It is
odd that in the world of animation, especially stop motion, where everything is possible, you
have to be careful not to push things too far, as even by these concepts they can become no
longer credible. My wanting to pull my Shakespeare puppet's head of for 'Yorick' worried me. If
I'd done so I would have destroyed all credibility.
But Bambi contains one favourite sequence, which is 'Drip drip drip little April
showers. This is so full of texture and atmosphere, with the drips glistening freshly.
We are lucky that puppets have such physicality; some sort of created l esh
and blood. Puppets are less interesting when they have been sculpted without
any detail or texture, in pastel colours straight of the most basic of computers,
wearing costumes that do not respond unexpectedly to lighting. I feel cheated of