“Animation is an in-depth, moment-by-moment exploration of space and time, of motion, both conscious and unconscious, of gravity, of weather, of material, of action and reaction. It asks, how does a leaf falling differ from a person falling? It looks at what I do with my hands when I’m worried, how I hold my shoulders while I’m waiting, where my eyes look when I’m sad. It asks, how do I position myself in relation to someone I love. Animators are observers and psychologists. They are actors inhabiting characters from the outside. They are physicists and engineers, first studying how things move in the real world, then figuring out how to represent that in an artificial one. How does a football bounce when it hits the ground? How does snow fall on a windy day? When you rub your eye, how long does it take to reposition itself properly in its socket? That’s one we explore in Anomalisa.
The thing I especially love about stop motion animation is that it has to figure out how to accomplish all this simulation in real space and actual time. A shirt has to be suspended in multiple positions in space as it is tossed toward a bed. How does it tumble as it’s tossed? All the different types of animators need to understand that trajectory, but only stop motion animators have to make it tumble in a real, albeit tiny room onto a real, albeit tiny bed. It has to be lit with real, albeit tiny lights. If the object tossed onto the bed is heavy enough—a suitcase, a person, for example—the bed has to react to the weight. Maybe the object has to bounce a little after it lands. How would it bounce? Straight up and down? Off at an angle? The animator must know. All this action has to be broken down into still photos, 24 of them for a second of screen time. Being involved in Anomalisa has made me more observant and more thoughtful about movement. I watch people walk and ask myself what it says about them. I watch myself fidget and ask the same questions. I notice gestures. I pay attention to the crazy movement of leaves in the breeze on the tree outside my window. I try to understand how those seemingly haphazard movements might be simplified but effectively represented. I realize we’re all moving constantly, in relation to others, unconsciously revealing our secrets, our fears, our attractions and repulsions, consciously trying to hide them, protect ourselves, make ourselves less obvious, less vulnerable.
Stop motion is an old fashioned, maybe even antiquated method of animation. And I love that about it, as well. I love that it is done by hand and that the “fingerprints” of the animators remains present in the finished film. You can see their presence in the slight chatter of clothing and hair, in the occasional awkwardness of a silicone body resisting being moved into a certain position. These are the flaws that make stop motion sing.
Lewis Hyde wrote a poem entitled “This Error is the Sign of Love” that resonates greatly with me. It begins:
This error is the sign of love,
the crack in the ice where the otters breathe,
the tear that saves a man from power,
the puff of smoke blown down the chimney one morning, and the
widower sighs and gives up his loneliness,
the lines transposed in the will so the widow must scatter
coins from the cliff instead of ashes and she marries
again, for love,
the speechlessness of lovers that forces them to leave it alone
while it sends up its first pale shoot like an onion
sprouting in the pantry,
this error is the sign of love.As we move into an increasingly virtual society, I find solace and comfort in the hands-on, human imperfection of the stop motion process. It is to me both heartbreaking and beautiful. The imperfections of the humans who create these works make it so. And, oddly perhaps, because of this, these puppets make me feel more connected to those sweet aspects of us as human beings.”
writing
/ˈrʌɪtɪŋ/
noun
1. the activity or skill of writing.
“parents want schools to concentrate on reading, writing, and arithmetic”
2. the activity or occupation of composing text for publication.
“she made a decent living from writing”
“It took just 10 years from scribbling this in prison, as leader of a banned party, for Hitler to achieve power. That happened, primarily, because the German economy collapsed and because no major power was willing to enforce the world “order” established at Versailles in 1919. But it also happened because, by the mid-1930s, a lot of people had begun to hate each other.
Since 1945, every generation in the educated world has been taught “the lessons” of the rise of Nazism. But surveying the world at the start of 2016 it seems as if we have been learning the wrong lessons. The world is awash with hatred. And since around a quarter of its inhabitants have mobile social media accounts we are leaving a very detailed evidential trail about its spread.”
–As Mein Kampf returns to Germany, the world is again awash with hatred | Paul Mason
Where do you see the film fitting within the spectrum from news to documentary?
“In Syd Field’s book about screenwriting, he said to take a phrase that must sing throughout the film and tape it to your typewriter. And here that phrase is “Europe smashed the first left government in modern history. The politicians made mistakes, but the people were always really strong.” That’s what it’s about.”
“the future is always incredibly obvious to someone”
Taking Drawing Lessons from Artist and Journalist Molly Crabapple
“There are certain things I do if I sit down to write,”
“I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning,” he explained. “I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon”
–
The Daily Habits of Famous Writers: Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King etc.
(t)
“Actually, there’s no secret. One simply pulls the cork out of the bottle, waits three minutes, and two thousand or more years of Scottish craftsmanship does the rest.”
- INTERVIEWER: Let’s start with obsession. You seem to have an obsessive way of repeatedly playing out permutations of a certain set of emblems and concerns. Things like the winding down of time, car crashes, birds and flying, drained swimming pools, airports, abandoned buildings, Ronald Reagan . . .
- BALLARD: I think you’re completely right. I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes.
- INTERVIEWER: So you rely on the magnetism of an obsession as a way of proceeding?
- BALLARD: Yes, so the unity of the enterprise is forever there. A whole universe can be bounded in a nutshell. Of course, why one chooses certain topics as the subject for one’s obsessions is a different matter. Why was I obsessed by car crashes? It’s such a peculiar idea.
- INTERVIEWER: Yes, why were you?
- BALLARD: Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.
from the Paris Review
The first great works of digital literature are already being written
“The problem is that people who like science and technology, and people who like storytelling and the arts have typically been placed in different buildings since about the age of 16. We haven’t been taught how to admire each others’ work, to recognise excellence, or even to know that there is excellence in “the other culture”. There’s a kind of sullen arrogance on both sides, with some people in both camps simply denying that the other knows anything worth listening to. There is a kind of “worthy” arts professional who thinks that knowing nothing about games – like saying “I don’t even own a television!” – is a marker of intellectual superiority.”
‘I set myself a schedule of three to five pages a day’
“With more than 40 works, five Man Booker nominations and a win under her belt, does she consider herself prolific? She scoffs at the word. “Joyce Carol Oates is prolific; I’m just old,” she says, drawing out the last word for laughs. At 75, she says writing hasn’t become any easier, listing her main distractions as laundry and emails. She sets herself a “schedule of pages rather than a schedule of times” aiming to write three to five pages a day. “You can cheat by increasing the type size,” she says. “Then you get really motivated and feel like you’re really speeding along.””
Paul Greer 