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‘They’re like little actors that only ever get to play one role. Everything they do is their swansong.’
Stop-motion animation, created by capturing incremental movements of physical objects and creating the illusion of motion when the individual images are played in sequence, has been a distinctive tool in filmmaking since the birth of cinema in the 1890s. Often used for special effects, from the groundbreaking visual tricks of Georges Méliès to the iconic sequence of King Kong scaling the Empire State Building, stop-motion has always enchanted filmmakers and audiences alike. More recently, stop-motion has been used to bring to life the intricate worlds of Aardman Animations (the Wallace and Gromit films, Chicken Run), Laika studios (Coraline, Kubo and the Two Strings), and the Wes Anderson films Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs. In this expressive short, the award-winning Scottish animator Ainslie Henderson reflects on the strangely sentimental experience of crafting stop-motion characters from found objects. He finds an ‘inherent sadness’ in his ephemeral creations, which briefly burst to life before being put back on the shelf, returning to their original inanimate state.
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Mood and emotion
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Ageing and death
Death is a trip – how new research links near-death and DMT experiences
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The environment
Photographs of rainforests dissolving in acid strike a beautiful note of warning
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Technology and the self
Adaptive technologies have helped Stephen Hawking, and many more, find their voice
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Ecology and environmental sciences
Experience the dazzling displays that fireflies create when humans are far away
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Gender and identity
‘When you’re done, you stay human!’ What gender transition means to John
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Stories and literature
Solaris and beyond – Stanisław Lem’s antidotes to the bores of American sci-fi
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Ecology and environmental sciences
To renew Yosemite, California should embrace a once-outlawed Indigenous practice
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Music
Before the Beatles dropped acid, a BBC workshop was creating far-out sounds
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