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Robert Morgan • STOPMOTION

Written By:

Vicky Lawrence
stopmotion

Stopmotion is a mind-bending psychological thriller that will unnerve you to your core. In his feature-length directorial debut, stop-motion animator Robert Morgan delves into themes of the tortured artist, imposter syndrome, and a descent into madness. With elements of a dissociative world and gore that strike disturbingly close to home, we had the opportunity to sit down with Robert to discuss the creation of this chilling film, the techniques he employed to achieve such an unsettling effect, and the inspirations behind Stopmotion

STARBURST: Stopmotion is very much focused on the idea of the tortured artist. Could you explain why you chose this main narrative and any other inspiration you had for the film?

Robert Morgan: The original idea was just that. I was excited by the idea years and years ago because my background is in stop-motion animation. I’d never seen stop-motion as a vocation depicted in a film. I’ve never seen a character who is a stop-motion animator in a film. And I thought it would be really interesting to explore a character who’s a stop-motion animator and everything that comes with that and make a psychological horror film out of it. Following the logic of it very naturally, I’ve had this experience where I’ve been working with puppets. Puppets have a strange way of feeling like they’re coming alive. It’s a bit disconcerting. You think you’re imposing your will on it, but is it telling you what it wants to be? I’ve had this kind of experience before. So very quickly, it became a film about a stop-motion artist who’s losing touch with reality and the things that are coming to light. Then, it just followed. It’s going to be the archetype of the artist who goes mad. That’s a story that we’ve seen many times, but I felt like showing that story through the lens of this particular art form, stop-motion animation. It excited me; the idea of doing the tortured artist story. We’ve seen it with painters, we’ve seen it with ventriloquists, we’ve seen it with ballet dancers. We’ve seen it with various art forms. We’ve never seen it with stop-motion animation. And for me, of all the art forms, that’s the one that I feel lends itself the most to going completely insane and puppets coming to life and haunting you. It does lend itself to a psychological horror film.

We believe that stop-motion animation is one of the hardest crafts to master, but for you, it’s your bread and butter. How was your experience creating a feature-length film with stop-motion compared to your history with shorts?

The challenges are bigger. The main thing is you’re essentially shooting a live-action movie but with animation incorporated into it. We shot this in 25 days. So it’s a pretty short, quick shoot, which was quite complex, as well. There were a lot of moving parts. The difference between the short films, where I’m mainly doing everything myself, and with this, is I had an amazing creative team around me. It was the sense of trusting the team, delegating, and letting go and choosing the team, carefully tuning them into the vision, and then giving them space, because you don’t have time to be changing your mind and steering into a different direction. Once that machine of production starts going, you’ve got to execute it, you’ve got like 10 things to get through today. Everything’s got to be working like clockwork. So it was the process of this different way of working, it’s less controlling and it’s more collaborative.

On the topic of having a good team behind you, we wanted to talk about the sound design because – and we say this in the best way – it was incredibly repulsive. So how did you achieve and create that really repulsive sound? 

The sound designer was a guy called Ben Baird, who is frankly a genius. He’s absolutely incredible. We had an absolute blast, he was coming up with a lot of stuff. He understood the film entirely but brought so much to the table that I hadn’t thought of. I always knew it was going to be squelchy. It had to be squelchy because that’s what I’ve always done in my shorts. It gives the puppets an extra dimension of physicality, when the sounds they make are extremely present in the film, it makes them much more difficult to dismiss as an invention. But what Ben brought additionally was, for example, his idea to do the squeaking of the armatures. I said to him, well, armatures don’t squeak. They don’t make a noise. But he said it doesn’t matter, it’s a dramatic thing, he was totally right. Because once we went with that, it really starts to become an eerie motif throughout the film, we can then start using it when the puppets are moving but we can also use it when the actors move. There are subtle scenes, for example, with Ella’s boyfriend, Tom; he turns his head and he squeaks. It’s like he’s got an armature inside. And that’s Ella’s perception, she’s starting to look at the people around her as meat puppets. Ben brought a huge amount to the table. He’s brilliant.

The other thing we wanted to talk about was the very visceral gore in the movie. How did you achieve that? And how did you get it so on par with how some of the puppets featured?

Again, it’s a collaboration thing. Dan Martin and his team did all the practical stuff. I also have to give a shout-out to Felicity Hickson, the production designer, who really was a real partner in this because she really oversaw the entire visual scheme with me. She really was very good at making sure these elements are working in conjunction with each other. It had to have an overall art-like feeling. It was very difficult to achieve, because we had to have puppets that were very organic, starting out with the practical materials like wax and then moving to meat. But then the ‘ash man’ shows up, then we had to make a real full size ‘ash man’ that needs to feel like it’s the same; it’s of the same family as the puppets, but it’s a man in a suit. So it’s a different kind of thing. But it all comes down to the fact that Ella starts using meat, it really comes from that idea. It’s morticians wax, first of all, it’s these macabre materials that she uses that dictates everything, including the stuff that happens with her leg and everything else. It all comes out of that one concept that she starts to believe that the puppets should be made out of life material itself.

We’ve watched some gory films and that scene really got to us. You could feel it!
I think the reason for it is because it’s actually quite small and intimate. It’s not as spectacular. I think for an audience, you understand it more. You don’t necessarily understand what it feels like for your head to explode; but you understand what it’s like when your leg has been cut or you’re pulling out a bit of skin or something. People could have experienced that, so they relate to it more. I think that’s why it’s so uncomfortable for people.

You’ve said this film has very much been your brainchild and how it’s been your vocation. But are there any very specific elements of the film that have been based on your own personal experience? The figures are very much very similar to what you’ve made before in the past.

I think there are elements of Ella’s character, obviously, I’ve never gone as far as Ella goes in it! The insecurity that she feels sometimes the feeling that like, do I have anything to say? Every artist, I think, can relate to that. I look at everything I’ve done and I’m like is it actually any good? Or is it crap? Am I kidding myself? Am I an imposter? It’s always a weird thing where you go “Okay, I’ve wanted to do this on my own and now I’m doing it”. Other people don’t know what it’s like to be me. They’re just looking at the work and they have different opinions. Some people like it, some people don’t, that’s fine. But my experience of having to go through and think of all these ideas and doubt them. It’s like, I have a different perception of it. That idea of impostor syndrome, self-doubt, that’s all autobiographical. I’ve been through all that and I think many artists have, too.

People are going to be your own worst critic at the end of the day, and to see that actualised in a film, and that feeling of never amounting to the master, which in this case is Ella’s mother. It’s such a tight-knit situation; it would drive us mad if we were in that position.

She can’t really win. She set herself such an impossible goal.

In a future project, if you could collaborate with anyone and I mean anyone, who would the dream partner be? 

I would love to co-write a screenplay with Edgar Allan Poe, an original screenplay with Edgar Allan Poe. I think I was talking about this the other day. I was asked who would be my dream date to take to the cinema and I said Poe, because he never saw a horror film. I would love to sit down with – maybe not a beer, because he had a bit of a drink problem – afterwards, go and take him to see a horror film, and talk to him about what he thought of this thing called cinema that can depict these kinds of states of horror that he wrote about. What would he have thought of a cinema, the dream that we all sit down and watch? Because I feel like the feverishness of a lot of his stories would really lend themselves to cinema. I mean, maybe I’d take him to go and see one of Roger Corman’s films. Maybe The Mask of the Red Death, but maybe that’s a bit too close. But to involve Poe with cinema would really be something, I think.

Do you have anything else coming up that we should keep on our radar?

Not right now in terms of making films, it’s various mountains that you climb, you know. You start at the bottom and you have to write the script, and then get the funding and then it gets made, and you promote it. And then that’s coming down again. I’m down the bottom of the other side of the mountain. I’m just writing new stuff. I’m starting that climb of the next mountain now. It won’t be for a while, but I’m developing various new projects. Stay tuned!

STOPMOTION is available on Blu-ray and DVD from July 1st.

 

Vicky Lawrence

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