Paul Bush

In ancient times they talked of a city in which you could meet youself at birth and on your deathbed. If a city ever existed in which the past and the future were united with the present, it would exist now, and forever...

More than three thousand insects appear in this film each for a single frame. As the colours glow and change across their bodies and wings it is as if the genetic programme of millions of years is taking place in a few minutes. It is a rampant creation that seems to defy the explanations of evolutionists and fundamentalists. It is like a mescalin dream of Charles Darwin's. The film is inspired by the insect collection of Walter Linsenmaier in the natural history museum of Luzern. As each insect follows the other, frame by frame, they appear to unfurl their antennae, scuttle along, or flap their wings as if trying to escape the pinions which attach them forever in their display cases. Just for a moment the eye is tricked into believing that these dead creatures still live . . .

A ship sets sail on an epic voyage through malignant natural and supernatural elements from which one man alone survives. An adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by19th Century wood engravings which are animated by scratching directly into the surface of color filmstock. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with its message of ecological redemption has a curiously contemporary resonance, but it is at the level of the mythic that the poem has lasting relevance; for this epic tale of extraordinary events simply mirrors the struggle that each human being faces on their own in his or her life. -VDB

A composite portrait of the human body assembled from details captured by close-up photography of over five hundred men and women of all ages and from all over the world.

The day is Friday, August 27, 2004. The Samurai are twenty six citizens of Tokyo, stopped as they pass in the busy Shinjuku business and entertainment district of the city. The warriors are asked to stand completely still for five minutes in front of a time- lapse camera while the teeming crowds of the biggest city in the world stream by.

It is the winter and the inhabitants of central Switzerland head for the mountains. They arrive in cars, trains, boats and buses, queue for the cable car, and then ski, snowboard, toboggan, eat, drink and fall asleep in one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. In the evening the workmen come out to prepare the snow for the next day. It is the weekend of 11 and 12 February 2006 at the ski resort of Klewenalp and the film-maker has captured the portraits of Swiss men, women and children using a time lapse camera whilst all around them an extraordinary activity takes place.

Most of the moving images produced for science, industry, commerce, and medicine are seen only by specialized audiences, and are then discarded soon after they are made. Rumour Of True Things is constructed entirely from such moving image ephemera, including computer games, weapons testing, production lines, monitoring, and marriage agency tapes. Rumour Of True Things is a remarkable anthropological portrait of a technologically-based society obsessed with imaging itself. -VDB

Quick cutting provides the speed in this tribute to two wheeled transport.

The true story of the German Air Ministry commissioning designs of an aircraft capable of bombing New York City during World War II. Each plan is reviewed through interviews, archive footage, re-creations, and 3-D animation.

A radical reworking of an etching by the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, brought to life by engraving frame by frame directly into the photographic emulsion of colour filmstock. The viewer is taken on a journey through the etching, accompanied by the sounds that the artist might have heard from his window as he worked. Scratched onto 8 perf 35mm colour filmstock and printed as negative.

A thoroughly modern geisha gets ready for a fun night out. This is the first episode of a (never completed!) series of short animations featuring the characters who appear in artist Lisa Milroy’s paintings. These depict the exploits of a group of geishas who think pleasure is more important than duty.

An experimental animation in which thousands of artifacts from the collections of small museums are brought to life in an animated history of human endeavor.

The third short riff of three films which use the same image; a short story which is just short of a love story.

This is a music clip for Percy Grainger's extraordinary orchestration of a gory Nordic folk song - Father and daughter. It is animated by scratching frame by frame into filmstock and features Jason Morrell and Annie Carpenter as the father and daughter who wreak havoc on each other and everyone around.

Short stop motion animation Directed by Paul Bush

The meeting of Hollywood’s most famous choreographer, and one of it’s most famous quotes “Is that a gun in your pocket?” (Mae West).

Drama, from the Greek, to do, act, or perform. A composition in which a story is related by means of dialogue and action and is represented with accompanying gesture, costume and scenery, as in real life, a play. The simplest story; a cow in a field, a day passes, articulated by a sequence of simple actions. Another day passes and the actions only vary with the chance events that make one day different from any other. Between the days three traditional songs about work, love and death are sung. These are stories too, but of generalisation, metaphor and myth, whereas the cow's drama follows only the surface pattern of events, the specific.

A journey into the centre of Hell; Dante's The Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustav Dore's wood engravings and animated by scratching directly into the surface of the film.

A parasitic presence has completely taken over the body of its host while allowing its movements and mannerisms to remain intact; a pas de deux from classical ballet has been restaged frame by frame with the two original dancers replaced by four new dancers. The movement remains continuous, but in each frame a different person occupies the dancers’ body spaces.

However much he lies there’s one part of a man’s body that always reveals the truth.