Everyone I know has begun to suffer from a symptom which I would like to call digital fatigue. We are tired of e-mail, cell phones and you're tired of digital effects in video and photography. Many photographers have begun to produce images in the darkroom again and there is a demand for craft, real things and authenticity. All this longing makes me long as well, for my dad's old VHS camera.
When I was ten, me and my sister sat on the floor in the living room, five floors above the Göta River and twenty thousand stories below the teapot floating in the cosmos. We had bought clay and made small clay figurines. Pigs, humans and aliens. Dads VHS camera was about as big as a sink, and stood ready on the floor. It was all about pressing REC and PAUSE simultaneously. Then came the hard part fiddling with the characters. Press PAUSE and film a second. Press the PAUSE button again. Change part of a clay hand, clay foot or clay face. Press PAUSE again. Shoot a second. We could go on like this for hours until we had recorded over an old Kevin Costner movie with a one minute clay animation consisting of a pig and an alien that were dancing bug. The films always tended to end with a big hand coming from above crushing every living thing on earth and so it became a colorful ball of clay.
Bonus - Aardman Animations are the creators of Wallace and Gromit. Now they have created a new series which immediately become one of my favorites. Its name is Shaun the Sheep.
Required time:
Four hours.
Cost:
€10 for the clay. Borrow someone's old VHS camera or film with your computer's webcam.
Cons:
It can get a bit messy on the floor.
Pros:
All great directors have old do-it-yourself stories behind them.
