I came across this video today, on the making of John Lewis' 2013 christmas advert, and I've rewatched it many times. I think it's fascinating. Being shown on television, I had only ever seen it as the 2-dimensional drawn animation I had assumed it to be. But it's so much more. There's something about seeing the directors and set makers holding these series of laser-cut animals, standing next to them, and placing them in a 3-dimensional set, that was really surreal, but amazing.
The comparison between the production and the finished, edited piece is what drives my recent work: the illusion of it all.
This has also got me thinking a lot about the format my work takes. I've always assumed that most of my experiments would result in installations. But this has definitely opened me up to the use of video. To be in that studio, in person, would have been so very different from watching the video. There couldn't be abrupt cutaway shots or editing, no stop-motion animation, and the only narrative would be that of real time.
My favourite parts of the video are the stop motions of the animators moving the characters, as they appear to move in natural time. It's something that can't exist in real time. It exists digitally, yet still shows the difference between digital and the 'real'.
