Mar 6, 2024

Robert Morgan is shuddering on the 31st, appearing in his shocking debut film, Stop Motion.

ifc's theatrical and streaming Shudder release, Stop Motion– One Word, no Hyphens– burst on screen on 2/23, marking the feature film directorial debut of British Stop Motion animator Robert Morgan. Born in Yateley, England in the 1970s, Morgan was already a veteran of award-winning stop-motion shorts, including Bobby Yeah, who was nominated for the 2012 BAFTA.

Stopmotion sprouted from the seeds of Morgan's 2013 Call – with an animator clicking the Bollex that is encompassed in his stop-motion work

"The Call was a low-budget short that went for Channel 4," recalls Morgan. "I needed someone who would be violently killed, and Robin was up for the task. For many years, I wanted to make a film about the process of stop-motion animation. I think it's a fascinating subject for a film that explores the psychological dimension of stop-motion animation and the weird, ritualistic, almost occult dimension The first idea I had to explore that subject was about a live camera, and the frame impregnated the camera like sperm and I took it for a while. I played with it, but I realized it wasn't a feature film, so we made a short film. Behind that, I continued to explore the idea and, with Robin, came up with a more sober exploration of the subject, which is what Stopmotion is.

This feature includes 93 stop motion shorts within 3 minutes of runtime. The first is the protagonist's mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), whose arthritic hands make it impossible for her to make frame-by-frame doll adjustments, a veteran stop-motion animation The latter 2 belongs to Suzanne's adult daughter, Ella (Aisling Franciosi), whose animation is an enthusiastic response to the insolent nature of the mother.

Suzanne's stop-motion work and animator's distinctive monastic work rituals set Ella's mother as the archetype of monster animation.

"The main problem was to clearly distinguish between Ella's work, like my work, and her mother's.Her mother felt that she had to be a very reliable talent in the world of stop motion. I didn't want her work to look cheesy. It had to have its own quality. The idea was to use myths, but I found the myth of Cyclops in particular interesting. It also made sense that Suzanne's thing was to adapt Greek mythology, which gave credibility to her art. In the back of my mind, I thought it was a bit Harrihausen-esque and mixed with the aesthetics of old children's television.

Away from her mother, Ella spirals into a wormhole of creative paranoia where a peculiar unnamed girl (Caoilinn Springall) pierces her nose into Ella's studio and punctures a dilapidated apartment that asks Ella to define the jargon "armature" and "mortician wax."

"We needed a playful education in case the audience wasn't used to it," Morgan explains. "The armature reference will be more creepy later, so we played on the idea of what's inside the doll," he said. Mortician wax is a thin edge of a wedge that starts the process of Ella using a more creepy material. It's the real thing I've used in many of my short films. And indeed, it was originally used to correct the faces of corpses so that their families could see them. It was supposed to be used in theaters to make fake noses. It is very malleable, looks like meat, but has a wax shape.

Stop-motion Puppets and Creature Suits Designer Dan Martin's 13 Fingers FX produced the characters seen in Ella's films. The dolls were mostly silicone rubber, with metal armatures recycled from Morgan's early short films.

"Silicone has a quality that looks fleshy," Morgan says. "I gave Dan and his team a lot of armature, and then he sculpted the doll. I was very involved in the sculpture and appearance of the doll. The meat dries, so it can not be used well in stop motion. It was not very practical when minced meat was used as an experiment.And it was not very practical when using chicken skins."

The vivid and sticky appearance of the doll was inherent in its material. "Silicone is shiny. And sometimes I'll rub it with a bit of vaseline that gives an extra gloss. It seems to be sweating. Then we added soil, bits of twigs, and soil.

Ella's animation featured the Dragonframe animation software with digital frame capture displayed on the laptop on the character's screen. "I am a convert," Morgan commented. "I was using iStopMotion, but I graduated to Dragonframe. I think Dragonframe is the best tool to do stop motion. So, we used it in movies, and even in movie fiction, Ella uses a dragon frame - that laptop is my laptop. The Ella setup shows exactly what my setup looks like.

Morgan worked with cinematographers Leo Hinstin, AFC, and production designer Felicity Hickson and spanned the live-action and animated aspects of the production during five weeks of major photography at 3 Mills Studios in London. The animation went in parallel, with animation director Andy Biddle shooting the stop motion. Daniel Carlson, Visual Effects supervisor, coached digital work through post-production at Nordisk Film Shortcut in Denmark.

The complexity of the plot required careful planning to fuse animation with live action, as Ella's reality blurs and her stop-motion works invade her life.

"When I animate my stuff, Morgan recalls. I might do a rough thumbnail sketch for a complex sequence. But I tend to shoot and edit as I go, so I can make a decision based on the last shot. In our live-action, Leo and I spent two weeks before filming and we listed every shot of the film. It evolved based on the schedule. Our only storyboard was when there was animation and live action (combination). All that had to be taken simultaneously with live action to create an exact matching plate.

"We made those scenes very carefully into storyboards and handed the storyboards and sets to the doll team. They would shoot the doll plates and we gave them to the VFX team who synthesized them together. During the editing, I shot all of the "film in film" stuff in my lounge, in parallel with the editing. It took about 3 months. The whole film was about 1 year, from pre-production to delivery," explains Morgan.

Ella's nemesis, Ashman, emerges from her stop-motion set to pursue her through a nightmarish dimension The clunky anthropomorphic Ashman takes shape as the conceptual art of Dominic Halstone and Dan Martin's team uses it as the basis for an authentic suit. It was a great experience. Ella crumples into stop motion as her legs give way beneath her.

"It was a nifty edit," Morgan observes. "We filmed that beginning on the set, and when Ashman first embodied it, we shot it during live-action filming. I shot in a heatwave in my parents' garage a few months later when they went through the wall, Ella ran down the hallway into a strange yellow room, and Ashman followed her.

The small stop-motion figure, which crept into Ella's apartment, clambered onto the bed and occupied other gory shapes, featured a digital composite of replicated live-action and stop-motion sets.

"We put those scenes into the storyboard very carefully," Morgan says. "The bedroom was set in 3 factories. But lying on the floor can not be animated, so we built a full-fledged replica of that set and raised it from the ground. We recorded the camera height and lighting details and passed them to the animation team. They filmed the animation, recreating everything for the camera setup in the exact same place on the raised set. Then the vfx team synthesized the shots.

The showdown between Ella and Ashman leads to a self-destructive showdown in which the animator puts a nail on her face that crushes like wax. Artist Phoebe Stringer has created a replica of Aisling Franciosi's head cast and wax head. The art department was dressed and equipped, Franciosi drew props to destroy.

"The wax dries very hard, so we had to heat the wax," Morgan said. "Ice Ring was standing behind it, putting her fake head in front of her, and she played the tear. The wax was warm, but if it gets too hot, it will melt. It had to be warm enough for her fingers to enter comfortably."

That moment climax with an abstract vision of organic blue eggs simmering in mysterious steam. "I can't say much about it without ruining it," Morgan adds. "Eggs have a certain connotation about hatching - it probably has something to do with creativity. Malignant creativity.

The disturbing vision of the stop-motion animator persona reflected Morgan's feelings about Kraft's lonely and miraculous process.

"It's a letter of love and hate, maybe," Morgan said. "It's more about creativity in general. And it's about my love-hate relationship with creative experiences - how irritating and soul-destroying it can be, how compulsive and surprising it is This film is about the relationship between being driven to do something and feeling destroyed by it at the same time. Stop motion was the perfect car for that. I have never seen it drawn before the movie. And I hope it gets beyond the strangeness of the art form and the sense of the occult.”