If you haven't yet been listening to Lorraine Bowen's stereo spectacular podcast then there is no time like the present, as her Christmas Special . . . (oh, the "present") . . . features a track from me and my band! Lorraine's podcasts are truly entertaining, this one even features vintage exercise routines, and tracks from John Shuttleworth and Lorraine Bowen herself.
hey . . . so as it's nearly Christmas I thought I would post the snowball papertoy I made last year for Cass Arts . . . you can click this link to print it out and make your very own . . . wow!
The central figure in this story is obviously the match girl herself, and this means the way everything else is described visually has to lead out of the way she is made. I use shadow puppets to portray her in this, and so other parts of the story either go forward from this - her visions for example are "extra" real in that they are 3D painted models, so they feel hyper-real to her, a cardboard girl, and then other people - the anonymous crowds in the city - are smudgey chalk animated loops, they have no individual character, no discernible strength or edges, but rather are lumps of storytelling devices, I imagined Carol by Patricia Highsmith when I was thinking of the crowd scenes, 1930s or 40s busy wintery crowds getting on with stuff in the city, and nothing to do with us or the story we are here to listen to, well, except to judge, maybe, as this is a Passion.
In earlier shows I have projected the shadow puppets and backgrounds simultaneously from an O.H.P. onto a screen, but here, as my processes have developed over the last couple of years, I am creating a much more layered piece, building up cut-out painted skyscrapers, the chalk animations, little models with lights and holes and clear coloured plastic - I perform the black cut-out cardboard shadow puppets in front of the camera, or sometimes behind a paper screen, like they did in the olden days . . . and it's still basically light and shadows, and here this means that a lot of the main puppet figures of the match girl are almost little cardboard automata - like two of my favourite artists Paul Spooner and Tim Hunkin - with one or two little functions to each perform to tell a specific piece of the story.
I made a video that explains a bit more of this and shows you some of the puppets actually moving . . .
in between finishing off the puppets and animations for The Little Match Girl Passion next week at Spitalfields Winter Music Festival I painted a Christmas card for the Unicorn Theatre in Southwark . . . here it is . . . it kind of made me think I should have painted Justin Hawkins riding it, maybe I should make an animated Christmas Darkness music video . . .
So I've been working on The Little Match Girl Passion again this week. In this live-animation I'm making for it I'm trying to create a world that is three-dimensional but made up of 2-D flat layers - drawn animations projected onto paper screens, paper cut-out shadow puppets, and here is the city for example, buildings drawn onto corrugated card and laid out in parallel formations . . .
when the match girl has her visions, however - when she strikes a match to keep warm and beautiful things reveal themselves in its glow - I wanted to make these in a different way, and I thought it would be somehow extra-real in this 2-D environment if everything in the visions was an actual three-dimensional object, like this dining room table at Christmas. The white plate behind the cake in this picture is empty because its where the goose was, but in her vision the goose jumps up and runs away.
Here is a video where I show you some of these scenes I've built this week, and a couple of the puppets that live in those worlds . . .
I've been working on some of the background animations for David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion that I'm making a live-animation for, commissioned by Opera North, and wanted to show you some of it. I've only done a very rough edit so far - rough in terms of compositing, the visual side of it I'm happy with. I mostly use animations in live shows to create skies, weather conditions, journeys - things that don't have actual people or animals in, and I was trying to justify why it was okay to have some things live and some things as filmed animations if there were people in the scenes, but to me I feel that the looping crowd scenes echo the looping text in the music, and I think its a way of saying to you as the viewer you can disregard these big groups of people as anything more important than all you see here, they are like the clouds going by, or the snow, repeating and never-ending, the brain gets the hang of a loop quite quickly I think and disengages if it looks like nothing is going to happen other than repetition, so I will be able to then puppet the main character - the match girl - live in front of these crowds. Its her story, it happens to be happening right now as we tell this story, whereas there will always be a crowd, the city is a never ending loop of anonymous people. Maybe I need to condense those sentences down a bit if I want to try and talk about this again, haha, but I hope you understand what I mean.
I'm working in charcoal for this, it has a dirty and dusty quality that feels suitable, kind of like I'm drawing with her burnt out matches, and actually when I opened the packet, i'd not bought this variety before, it looked like a little prop from a puppet film for her matches . . .
I was inspired to work this way watching William Kentridge's films. I'm sure other people work this way too, but I haven't seen anyone else with such a confident rawness. The basic technique is to draw an image, take a shot, erase it and draw the next image over the top, and as you erase each image and move forward it leaves behind a ghostly trace of the sequence.
And also as bits of charcoal crumble off (if you are working on a horizontal flat surface) they build up nicely around where the crowd's feet are supposed to be and look like footprints and dirty snow.
I made this video cover-version of Sal Bernardi's Pretty Poison to test out a new camera and also try some clever (but not that clever really) editing things . . .
