Featuring Ilan Bachrach, Gabel Eiben, Anne Gridley, Matthew Korahais, Julie LaMendola, and Kristin Worrall. Filmed in an apartment in New York by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper.
This video is part of a series of stop motion animations that were made in 2011 and 2012 by Nature Theater of Oklahoma as a preparation and exploration for a projected animated film that would eventually become Life and Times - Episode 4.5. The films were composed from individual still photographs shot with a Cannon Mark ii camera in various locations while the company was on tour with Life and Times - Episodes 1 and 2. No one in the company had ever done animated film before, and we were learning as we experimented. Breaking down time into individual still moments was a challenge both for the directors and the actors involved. The individual photographs -- done often over the course of an entire day -- were later assembled in Final Cut at a rate of 10 frames per second to create the motion.
For this animation, we were working with a large group of people and some Kleenex. The Kleenex was an unplanned element, but as the afternoon stretched on and some of the actors needed to leave, it became a way to magically make actors disappear or to turn into other actors. We would just cover them with Kleenex, and they could leave and we would replace them with another actor covered in Kleenex and we could keep working. At the end, only Gabel remained and we tried something we always wanted to do which was drawn animation (his eyes). This drawing gave us inspiration to work with drawn images for Episode 4.5
To see other animations in the series, go to: vimeopro.com/oktheater/stop-motion-animations