Life is hard, but animation is harder.

Hello gentle readers. It’s been over a month since I last wrote in this blog, and I felt that I should share with you what has been preoccupying my time. As some of you may know, I’ve been working in the medium of stop-motion animation these past few months. Animation has a tendency to devour time like a hungry little baby, and my new animation is a greedy baby, indeed. Now, before I get too ahead of myself, allow me to backtrack a bit.

Back in October, I lamented over the large amount of time and effort required to properly prepare a media artist grant application. I wrote that “[the grant application] is a long, tedious, and painful process that I submit to only grudgingly.” However, as the old axiom goes “you get out of life what you put in”, and this past exercise in painful tedium was no exception to this rule. I received both media artist grants to which I applied. There’s a reason why old axioms are old: they’re generally true.

Above is a “quick & dirty” test I worked on today for one of my new paper puppets. And by “quick”, I mean that it took me several hours to produce those 7 seconds. This is a rough, and by no means a finished work. Lots of pop and flicker in the lights. There is no audio.

Animaldiçoados/Animacursed 2012

Film still from “Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery”, 2012, stop-motion animation done with paper cutouts and puppets.

It’s official. My animated short film Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery has been selected under the International category for Animaldiçoados/Animacursed 2012, a film festival in Rio de Janeiro that features horror, suspense, and “other cursed” genres of animation. Mine is probably under the “other cursed” or possibly the “WTF” category, should they have one of those.

Visit the festival web site (in Portuguese, of course) and check out the selected films. Pretty solid programming! Amazingly enough, I’m sharing screen time with Julia Pott (see my last blog entry When I grow up, I want to make films like Julia). Not sure how that happened.

Domestikia: An Account of Some Strange Disturbances. The Incident in the Nursery.

Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery. from Jennifer Linton on Vimeo.

At last, I’ve completed my second stop-motion animated short film. Domestikia uses paper cutouts and articulated paper puppets in a stop-motion animation to explore the strange, dreamlike and uncanny realm of the Domestic Gothic.  With a healthy dose of black humour, it tackles the anxieties and challenges experienced by parents of young children. The ‘Domestic Gothic’ as a motif developed through the writing of 19th-century women Gothic novelists, such as the Brontë Sisters, and dealt specifically with the horror of confinement felt by women who were ‘imprisoned’ within the home and unable to move freely in Victorian society. With contemporary women still predominantly acting as primary caregivers to their children — and thus financially penalized by either remaining at home or opting for employment that allows for ‘family friendly’ work hours — this sense of confinement is still present. The realm of the domestic has become infiltrated by strange creatures — a giant butterfly, an octopus, and bird-headed children — whose presence suggest a level of discomfort within the home. These creatures are the physical manifestation of Freud’s das Unheimlich (translates to English as ‘the uncanny’), a term which literally means ‘unhomely.’

All images and animation were done by me, in my basement.