The Little Mermaid

Have you ever  tried working with a 200-watt light bulb blazing at each side of your head? I’d say it’s somewhat like the sensation a consciousness-endowed eggplant would experience inside a solar oven on a July day in Arizona, about halfway to its final form as baba ghanoush. Try it sometime. Working between two 200-watt light bulbs, I mean, not the baba ghanoush. I’m sure that you, sophisticated reader, have already tried baba ghanoush.

I mention this unique sensation of being solar-baked because working alongside 200-watt light bulbs is a necessary part of making stop animation, which is the medium I’ve been exploring this year. The realm of the Brothers Quay, Martha Coburn, and Gumby and Poky, stop animation is the process of making physical objects appear to move by capturing them in sequential photographs.

Setting up a shot on my animation stage

In my new three-minute stop animation, “The Little Mermaid,” the physical objects are two-dimensional jointed puppets that tell the story of a solitary mermaid. This project is the result of about four months of work, and the mounting of a lot of steep learning curves, including figuring out how to set up a useable animation stage, getting some kind of grip on creating the desired animation speeds and motion, and getting accustomed to the subtleties of digital photography beyond the snapshot camera.

“The Little Mermaid” makes its Internet debut October 7^th on the great Gothtober.com. So, this Sunday, when you come back from your starry-eyed Sunday stroll or leisurely autumn picnic in the park (or harried soccer practice pickup, or desperate dash through the grocery store, arms full of deli-packed baba ghanoush, or whatever your Sunday looks like), I invite you to click on Gothtober pumpkin number 7 and meet the little mermaid.

Go to the second "Little Mermaid" entry