THE EAGLEMAN STAG 2010

The Eagleman Stag is a stop motion animated film by Mickey Please. The story is about a man who goes to extreme lengths to counter his accelerating perception of time.The Film won a BAFTA for the Best Short Animation in 2011.

This film contains a dialogue in order to tell the story. The dialogue does support the film though out the story, if this film didn’t have dialogue it wouldn’t make sense to the audiences whats happening on screen. When you watch the film you really have to observe and listen to understand whats happening in each scene.The dialogue also helps the audiences to understand how the character is feeling, and helps you guide through Peter’s imagination from the beginning of his life.

The story does sometimes match the dialogue throughout the film, it explains what the character is feeling and thinking and takes you through the time of his life and rewinds back to the past.
When the characters are talking, Please does not illustrate what they are talking about, for example, the scene when Peter is talking to Phillip over a drink, “The entire world is defined by context, even the way we are passing through time, every second is smaller.”
He spills the pint on the table and when his friend Phillip replies to him, he shows him a book while saying, “Got some beer in your beard”. And then it cuts to the next scene.

Despite the dialogue i really hard to understand, I really enjoyed the animation and the creativity with it. You can tell Please put a lot of hard work and imagination to his film, and i can see why this film won a BAFTA for best short.

THE HAND 1965

The hand is a stop motion puppet film, directed by Jiri Trnka. The story follows a Harlequin, who is an artist that makes pots. Then he has a conflict with the power Hand, who commands the harlequin to just do sculptured hands. This was Trnka’s final film, when he sadly passed away in 1968. When Trnka died, the film was banned due to its story that reflects a restrictive environment in which many artists had to work.

The director has to think of the key techniques that the audiences needs to understand, when it comes to storytelling in animation. The background is the main set that your character is going to perform. The background can tell the audiences a lot about the characters backstory. The Harlequin is artist who makes sculptures, he wishes to make ceramic pots for his flowers. You can see by the set that there are pots on the floor and his spinning wheel table top.

There could be a set time period in this film by what the character is wearing, The harlequin costume is french, they are also mute, that’s why the character has no dialogue. When it comes to animation, location is not very imported in stop motion, you can set a scene anywhere as long as it fits the story.

There’s no dialogue in this film, moving techniques is very imported when comes to animating a puppet character. The audiences need to recognize the body language to show how the character is feeling. The Hand character has to be shown by movement because it has not got a face, so the Hand needs to do lots of body movement by moving his fingers and way he presents himself on screen. In one scene they have speech bubbles when the Harlequin is talking to the Hand on the telephone, this is an other technique to show the audiences what the characters are saying to each other.

The music brings more atmosphere to the scene. When you get first introduced to Harlequin the birds are singing and the sound of the flute playing in the background. This brings joy to the scene.
An other example is in the scene when the Hand and the Harlequin have a conflict and theirs sound of drums and base, while the Harlequin tries to hit the Hand’s fingers with a hammer, to show the characters is slightly angry.