House on a Frozen Lake

Details: 1996, 10 mins, 35mm, stop motion puppet, no computer aids

Background

What are we if not the product of our environments? This film explores the influences an environment has on a person. It has plenty of symbolism and references in it, you can have some fun working them out for yourself!

It was influenced by Mervyn Peake’s ‘Gormenghast’, and living in an abandoned room in the film school for a couple of years. Sure enough, the following year I escaped to make my next film in siberia – about as far away as I could get! A couple of years before I had visited St Petersburg, and saw the fishermen out on the frozen estuary, fishing through holes they drilled in the ice. This made a huge impact on me, I was very amazed by it, I shot some 16mm footage on my Bolex, a bit of which is used in the film.

Credits

Directed – Lucy Lee
Producer – Myf Hopkins (assistant Donal McCusker)
Script – Lucy Lee, Zillah Crosby
Animation & Puppets – Lucy Lee (assistants Julie Otten, Tara Bacon)
Sound – Adele Kellett
Music – Sam Sutton
© NFTS 1996

Festivals & Distribution

1997
Edinburgh Film Festival
Melbourne International Film Festival
International Short Film Fest – Krakow
1998
Hiroshima
2005
ROSHD International Film Festival, Tehran – Iran

(I’m not sure where else it went)

Technique

Puppet animation, with no computer aids (I have to say this as nowadays it is virtually impossible to do it with out some sort of computer), but this is blind straight ahead animation. The great thing about this method of animating is that in order to do it well and instil personality into your characters you have to really ‘get into the zone’, you have to live what your characters are living and feel what they feel. The characters definitely came alive for me as soon as I began to animate them, I actually had to ask their permission each morning to manhandle them. ‘I just need to move your leg now, do you mind?’ OK I’m not totally mad, its just an expression of how real they felt to me, and that, is how to animated them with feeling, to give them personality and emotion, not just motion.

The puppets are 14.5 inches high and made of chicken bones with Bolsa wood heads and ball and socket joints. The bird is a real Blackbird skeleton, with animation wire running through the bones. Yes I found a dead blackbird, boiled it, peeled off the feathers, flesh, and innards, cleaned each bone, varnished each bone, drilled a hole each end, re-assembled it, and threaded it with aluminium wire. Birds of flight have hollow bones, by the way. The chicken bones were quite different to work with.

Stills Slideshow

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