Hello,
I am a writer, as well as an animator of stop motion films. A penchant for tales of imagination and lost times. Trying to lose as little time as possible.
My books have supernatural elements, tales of ghosts living amongst the mortals.
My animations are lighter tales of friendships and the simple travails of life.
Some common questions I get at festivals, conversations, et al:
Do you really work alone on these films?
--- Yes. I fabricate the puppets in wool felt over steel / wooden armatures. I build sets (usually from full sized real world objects). I then animate in stop motion/analog fashion, one movement at a time. I use a minimum of rigs and
post production digital effects. It's all quite traditional.
Why stop motion?
--- All storytelling is about illusion and believability. At face value, those two things are contradictory. Yet strangely, we don't have any problem with that when we read or watch any work of fiction. I know I'm watching a puppet. I know a puppet made of wool can't move. What I'm experiencing is the illusion of it moving as its ambulation is broken down into thousands of individual parts, then strung together to tell me a story. And because I'm human and love stories as all humans do, I accept the illusion, believe it, and go along for the ride. What could be more fun than that?
Aren't the raccoons, mice, cats, etc in your films just stand-ins for people?
--If the question is: Are you guilty of anthropomorphism? Yes. Humans have been doing that since our earliest days on the planet, and I'm not getting in the way of that.