Lens Me Your Ears

This is my first post on this blog as the pretender to to Tom's role as Saatchi's arbiter elegantiarum, and in an effort to create a seamless transition I refer to one of the short films recently mentioned on his Nokia post.

'Dot' is a 1''37' film produced for Nokia by Nick Park's Aardman Films and uses a Nokia N8 phone with a microscope lens attached. It is billed as the world's smallest ever stop motion film, and the results are impressive. Stop motion is the Lazarus of film making making a comeback every couple of years, but with such advanced technology available, why do we keep coming back to this old method of animation? Firstly, it is precisely because of the new opportunities opened up by advances in the peripheral technology that keep the style coming, with digital cameras significantly easing the load of the stop motion animator. But to me this is secondary to the fact that stop motion is a genre fraught with restrictions, and that it is these limitations that give it its power to create truly original work. Sometimes the seemingly limitless options afforded by digital effects actually stifle creativity instead of stimulating it. It is the restriction of the technique that gives the film life, and makes it this example as impressive and original as it is. What you inevitably are left with is innovative and displays real craftmanship, like in this ad for Kindle from earlier this year.