This stop-motion animation was made by Lisa with paper cut-outs from lino-prints created by scientist Sue Fenech. Sue drew from memory a range of complex forms of algae that she knows from a lifetime of looking through microscopes and drawing. She drew and carved the forms by hand into lino and then applied ink and pressed with her hand on the back on the lino to transfer the image onto paper.
Music is ‘Scarbo’, ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ by Ravel, and played on piano by Farrah Sa’adullah.
The animation method I used is called ‘straight-ahead animation’. This means I make no plan. I follow my nose, allowing the materials I’m using to suggest to me their story. So here I moved paper pieces under a camera, little by little, and photographed each change of scene frame-by frame. I joined the images to make a movie, using the free Open Source program ‘Open Shot’. The movie made the algae appear to dance, as you can see them do in water when you look through a microscope. So this idea led to me thinking. Whales eat Krill and would swallow lots of water with the Krill. I’d already animated a drawing of a whale that I’d seen engraved on sandstone near Sydney. So I could then combine the animations to suggest the watery world within Whale. This would also relate back to Krill who live on algae and other tiny things. I kept thinking of the algae dancing and remembered that I’d animated pages in a book of drawings I had made of children dancing at the Rozelle School of Visual Arts. And so ideas flow and grow to connect the creatures. There are so many creatures with stories to tell!
Lisa Roberts