WILD Part 2 (adventures in stop motion)

My dreamy dream ideal ending for my latest dance film project is a simple stop motion series of shots. Throughout the piece, two dancers blur and roar through the woods, increasingly swamped by a hoard of paper flowers. In the final image (spoiler alert!), one of the dancers is finally still as the flowers rush over her body, burying her completely. Jon, who shot this piece beautifully with Tim, took the photos for the final stop motion footage. But today I'd like to share some of my early efforts in the dance studio with a very patient, very still Erika. Executing stop motion is new to me, but I connect to the simplicity of the form. I love the idea that you're only capturing choice moments in time. Behind the scenes, people rush around to crystalize each moment just right (in our case, it was a team of two, Tim and me, me and Tim, in a race against the sunset-ing light after a 12 hour wonder shoot). But you don't see the rushing, you just see the crystalizing.

All this stop motion chatter makes me want to try this live in performance. How would you hide the rushing? Light cues? Puppets? Set devices? A team of dancers who rush around and adjust other dancers just so? The movers and the moved? Hmm. I don't know. But I'd like to find out.

And here are some of my stop motion favorites. In no way am I in the land where these categories exist, but I love them for the following reasons...

"WORKU" created by Keita Funamoto & Masahide Kobayashi (Village of Marchen)

Wonder! Sense of real breath, space and time. Real-time decision making. It goes without saying, but I'll say it, whim plus "sy" for real. Dark and magical and yet still grounded in real tasks.

"End Love" music video directed by OK Go, Eric Gunther and Jeff Lieberman

Fun and my kind of fabulous. Delightful mix of video and stills that blend super tech-y video editing and simple stop motion. Unexpected moving parts.