Balance short film

(*welcome to any new readers :)

Got Secrets of Oscar-winning Animation by Olivier Cotte, out of the library, because libraries rock!

One of the films reviewed is Balance which is a great film.



Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein animated this film in 5 months, in their parents spare room, while still attending university, for about $5000 (which I assume is mostly for the film) and won an oscar.

Excerpts from Cotte's interview with the brothers Lauenstein:

The animated puppet film can't develop the same themes as traditional cinema; for example, a love story with complex characters, which is rich in trivial detail, needs to be filmed with real actors. But for us, the choice of the puppet was appropriate to show human behaviour whilst doing without trivialities. This fundamental notion is what drove us to make Balance.

At the time, we liked playing music and we used to compare cinematography with the art of music making. With music, you can create emotions by using only a few notes. We wanted to sue this purity, this simplicity in the cinema. That is, we wanted to play with very few elements to obtain something true, to get to the essentials.



(For the stopmo concerned, wood for the skeletons, clay for the heads, Layers of foam and cork over 1/2 a ping pong table, pins for tiedowns, pinholes in the pupils to change sightlines)

makes me want to get a garage, learn Justin Rasch's trick for not sleeping, and make my own film.


and a paraphrased quote from Zorba the Greek (which I just watched today because Libraries rock) "man must have a little bit of madness in him, or else he won't have the courage to cut the rope so that he may fly free"