Scorsese or Kubrick?

uite unexpectedly, I've found myself in the role of film director recently, something I could quite easily get used to. I was testing some shots for the Hamlet stop-motion film, and although my fellow students found it hard to be serious actors for any length of time, I really enjoyed experimenting with angles and heights in the two-camera set up.

I've settled on using pixillation as my technique because my experiments with plasticene didn't work well. I'd love to build a couple of models using latex round properly-jointed armatures, like Wallace and Gromit, but that's beyond the time and budget available. Sometime in the future, perhaps.

I've also settled on a metaphor to epitomise the play's themes: hands. Hands will hold Hamlet's ankles to represent his prevarication, and Laertes and Hamlet's father's ghost will both point to Claudius to indicate his guilt. Laertes doing this will be the signal that releases Hamlet and he charges (apparently sliding across the floor) towards Claudius and stabs him.

There are some performing arts students I hope to use as actors instead of people on my course, and I'm making masks to complete the transformations.

After I'd finished the tests, we started trying some other ideas. One was based on a technique used by Norman McLaren, where an actor repeatedly jumped up into the air, bending his knees while off the ground, and a single shot was taken at the top of each jump. Since the actor moved sideways slightly between each jump, the end result looked like he floated through the air. It was much easier to time the shot than I'd expected. The only drawback was for the poor actor, who was exhausted by the end.