Alistair Keddie : big Alba photo

Animation Stills; Mechanical Figures

Mechanical Figures - Images by Alistair Keddie

A set of production stills from work in progress on various of the stop motion sequences from the Mechanical Figures project.  Mechanical Figures is an experimental art / documentary film and multimedia project out of Zagreb, Croatia.  It is an independent production being put being put together by director Helena Bulaja along with a small team of dedicated artists, musicians and film makers.  The project explores the nature of creativity through the work of ‘lost’ visionary inventor Nikola Tesla.  Tesla, a contemporary and rival of Edison, was working on the wireless transmission of power and his patents are responsible for much of the modern AC power systems we use each day.  He was the first to install hydro power at Niagara Falls and is also responsible for the radio.  One of the many mysteries that surround him is how little he is known today and the film explores his impact and inspiration on other scientists and artists through interviews with Terry Gilliam, Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovic, Christopher Priest and Douglas Rushkoff amongst others.

These stills show some of the process behind the stop motion animation sequences we worked on for the film.  In general, most are shot on a Canon 400d using a variety of lens.  We shot everything at full digital still resolution, way above the requirements for HD video.  This allows for much better creative control in post production, allowing the director to create her multi plane collages and cut ups as well as for more traditional close up zooms and pans.  It also gives a bank of photography for planned print aspects of the project.  During shooting, for much of the time we used quite long exposures.  This allowed us to play around more with light and movement.  I subsequently learned the term that Aardman use is Go Motion.  Basically the long exposure allows you to pull, stretch and blur objects you have in motion, creating some interesting and exciting effects in camera.  Doing as much as possible ‘in camera’ is important to Helena as it retains the basic craft and control so often lost in computer generated sequences.  Effectively, it looks hand made and captures something of the accidental expressive qualities of work with real materials.As well as shooting on location out of doors we mostly spent long periods of time working in the studio, usually in full blackout to control the lighting.  A few weeks of this becomes quite disorientating as you lose track of night and day, living in almost permanent darkness while meantime, outside on a cool day its 34 degrees.  This placed quite a strain on the air conditioning and a few grumbles with my Croatian colleagues as my ‘comfortable’ 20 degrees kept me in shorts and them wrapped up in jumpers!  But I think you get the picture, hot, dark and sweaty days inside while the sun blazes out, the joys of animation…

But we did have a lot of fun making the sequences.  Working pretty low key and with a lot of found resources and cutout photographs as well as some beautifully made ceramic bugs.  Sixteen of these in total were made by Sabina Hahn in New York, with some unfortunately arriving in Zagreb badly smashed to pieces in the post.  Hence the sequence we made with the bugs being magically reconstructed by the other intact models as we glued the pieces back together one frame at a time.  The bugs are a key ingredient of the animation sequences and are inspired by the story of how, as a child, Tesla built a small flying machine powered by sixteen June bugs.  They appear in most of the sequences we made, taking on a life of their own and tying many of the projects overall themes together.

The team involved in producing the stop motion sequences were…
Ed Beals from Canada (co director and lead animator)
Dea Jagic (animator and lead hand drawn animation)
Blaz Habus (animator and motion compositor)
Helena Bulaja (director and animator)
and myself co directing and animating

Background photograph Mare Milin

You can see a trailer for the film in my previous post Mechanical Figures here or visit Helena’s Vimeo channel here also, there is an excellent interview with Helena Bulaja on Body Pixel here. You can view the full gallery of stills by clicking here or on any of the pictures above.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 28th, 2010 at 10:46 am. It is filed under events, film and tagged with animation, art, croatia, film, long exposure, photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.