Tag: stop-motion

The Brothers Quay Retrospective was fantastic. Street of Crocodiles and The Epic of Gilgamesh (aka This Unnameable Little Broom) are still resting behind my eyes, making the world a nicer place to live. Not only do I now have a precise imagine of what I wish to do with my cat skull, I woke up in a night that was almost morning and let my blindness guide me through almost a musical exploration of lines of thick shadow and knots unwinding. By the time I finally got up to face down my day, I had already written full paragraphs of script in my head. (I will never regret keeping all my baby teeth or that small box of broken watches). Now it is only upon me to learn how to tweak the settings on my Canon to something appropriate for stop-motion animation.

I will state for the record that I hated the stop-motion course I took, the teacher’s remarks were too open-ended, there were no crits that weren’t blindingly obvious, and I found the other students ideas oddly insipid, them: “I know how to end it! Let’s kill off our character with a giant rolling Indiana Jones ball of plasticine!” me: “No, let’s end it with the beginning of that Franz Kafka story where the guy turns into a bug, the articulation would be really… nevermind” (welcome to me at twelve), but it still remains one of the most useful classes my mother ever enrolled me in. The only classes that frustrated me more were the Architecture and Painting Courses where they didn’t give us a lick of information, just gave us supplies and told us to go nuts. If I recall correctly, I ended up building a small house for cats that I was incredibly unsatisfied with and an awkward triptych of paintings my mother loved, but could barely fit on the bus home.