Getting Personal - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 76

one day short of a year. Since these are gifts given by 'my true love' I made a leap, worthy of
The Da Vinci Code , imagining each gift as a quality needed to help the lady in question make it
through the next year. The single missing gift would be her lover himself. It all fell conveniently
into place, and with no grounding at all.
How were your fi rst attempts at making a fi lm?
JD - My fi rst animation test, aged twelve, was a cowboy shooting a rattlesnake, using puppets made from
coloured chenille-covered bendable pipe cleaners. I also fi lmed a Winnie-the-Pooh marionette scene
using an old teddy bear, and my brother as Christopher Robin.
TB - I wanted to be like Ray Harryhausen and would come up with feature movie ideas, drawing key
highlights of the fi lm story. Being a teenager, I couldn't afford to make a feature fi lm, so many of the drawings,
sketches and creature ideas found themselves in shorter fi lm experiments that my friend Kent and I did.
RC - The majority of us didn't want to be 'like' Ray … we wanted to 'be' Ray Harryhausen. Realising that the
job's taken, we started to learn how to do it ourselves, designing characters, and fi tting them into a story.
DC - I tried to pretend my toys came to life!
AW - I didn't know much about fi lms before I started animating.
SB - I wanted to make sci-fi fi lms, I tried to write a Battlestar Galactica script and got nowhere.
Animation came later.
TD - Aged twelve I wanted to animate Richard Adams' Watership Down , to make the characters inside my
imagination come alive in some way. My fi rst serious attempt at a fl ip topic was a hopping rabbit. I'd no
idea how to proceed, and never fi nished it, but in trying to envision and fi gure it out, I found using many
different parts of my brain together at the same time was satisfying for me.
RH - I imagined characters and storylines with my toys and wanted to make fi lms with the family
camcorder. I built Lego sets and made my own stories with the characters and acted them out. I had my
own glove-puppet show, and once entertained lots of younger children at a birthday party.
JC - I never considered being a fi lm-maker. I was always a storyteller though. I would write my own
stories (infl uenced by topics I was reading). One series was based on Lego fi gures we had. I'd write
adventures heavily laced with descriptions of the surrounding, clothes and feasts. All the characters had
the names of my extended family. Even my guinea pigs featured. I used the stories to mock my brothers.
These were adventures with happy endings. For each story I'd draw a series of numbered pictures that
the listener was supposed to look at when I read out aloud.
FL - No, I didn't make fi lms as a kid. I'm thinking now that it is needed some technology, that I didn't
have access to it. I did draw a lot.
DS - I was interested in process as much as anything, so as a youngster the idea of making a fi lm interested
me from a 'how is it done' perspective. At heart I'm a technician and only later did the idea of telling stories
using the medium became the key factor. Aged about thirteen, I made a little model set-up with a Bendy
Toy Gonk character on a crude desert island and wanted to fi lm it. My father asked 'what's the plot?' and I
found myself a bit fl ummoxed as I hadn't actually worked out the story other than there was gonk on a
desert island!