Stop, don’t go: stop-motion animation creates life from the stuff we throw away

‘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.

Spoiler alert: does knowing how it ends make fiction more fun?

‘It’s not the journey, it’s the destination’ might seem like trite advice, but when it comes to storytelling, the worn adage actually seems to hold up to scrutiny. Just ask Nicholas Christenfeld, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego: in a 2013 study, he put our cultural obsession with so-called ‘spoilers’ to the test. After sneakily revealing the end of short stories when describing them to test subjects, he found that their enjoyment of the fictional narratives actually increased – a conclusion that perhaps isn’t so surprising if you think about how many times you’ve watched your favourite movie or read your favourite book. However, Christenfeld still found that there was a forceful knee-jerk aversion to the idea of having a story spoiled, so you might still want to restrain yourself before blurting out the latest Game of Thrones twist to friends and insisting it’s for their own good.

Meet the jazz pianist who improvises in tandem with a piano that plays itself

‘How can I be free in this particular cage?’

From synthesizers replacing real instruments in the studio to the rise of musical compositions written entirely by AI, it’s not surprising that many professional musicians have been resistant to the ascendent role of technology in the music industry. However, the French-American jazz pianist and composer Dan Tepfer has developed a creative way of leveraging the rise of musical machines using what he calls ‘improvisational algorithms’.

On his digital player piano, his notes are sent through a computer, which then automatically plays back notes that correspond to commands he’s written. And although the idea of predetermined ‘rules’ might on its surface seem to cut against the spirit of musical improvisation, Tepfer finds that they actually fuel his playing, leading him down paths he wouldn’t otherwise find. This video from NPR’s Jazz Night in America series details how Tepfer mines new musical ideas from his improvisational algorithms, which culminated in his album Natural Machines (2019) and a series of performances with visuals generated from the compositions. Read more about Dan Tepfer at NPR’s website.

What motivated three young Britons to join the deadly fight against ISIS in Syria?

As of 2019, some 20 British nationals have left home to join the fight against ISIS in Syria. Eight have died in the process. What’s leading Britons – mostly young civilians – to abandon the relative comforts of home and fight on the frontlines alongside people with whom they had no prior affiliation? Someone Else’s War tracks the journey of three sets of bereaved parents as they travel to Iraq to meet the Kurdish soldiers who witnessed their children’s last months. A nuanced and frequently heartbreaking psychological portrait, the film finds the parents grasping for the meaning of their children’s choices. As the parents’ own views evolve through the process of digging deeper into the stories of their children’s deaths, the documentary explores not only the need for closure, but also the tendency to seek heroism in those who die fighting. 

Classical ballet transforms into a dance of the surreal in this duet from 1968

In classical ballet, a pas de deux (‘step of two’ in French) is a duet that showcases the skills of masterful dancers. This BAFTA-winning and Academy Award-nominated short from 1968 marries two distinct kinds of virtuosity – the innovative cinematography of the late Scottish-Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren and the movements of the Canadian dancers Margaret Mercier and Vincent Warren – to dazzling effect. Accompanied by a shimmering arrangement of Romanian folk music, a woman dances alone until she is joined by a man. Impressions of their bodies splinter off or move alongside them before disappearing or resolving into a single form. McLaren created the aesthetic in an age before digital effects by superimposing the high-contrast footage over itself with a slight time disparity, up to 10 times. The result is something akin to a wonderfully surreal dream – and one that you hardly need to be a ballet lover to find utterly entrancing.