Directing
Split-screen, bilingual stop-motion film, in which two neighbours turn to technology in their search for companionship and acceptance.
This multi-layered animation explores autobiographical memory and the cultural elements of our earliest childhood memory. Often episodic, this recollection of personally experienced past events often emerge from as early as three years old. After the age of five, these memories become elusive. A journey back to where it all began can be both beautiful and enlightening.
A story of two down at heel friends, killing time, bickering, playing games and hoping to become rich and famous using a brain reading machine. The flaws in their construction reflect and amplify the flaws in their characters and the comic hopelessness of their situation. The characters developed from working with John Hegley,a performance poet, on animating a surreal sketch John had performed with Simon Munnery, where one person thinks of a breed of dog and the other person has to guess which one he's thinking of. This dialogue became the starting point for the script. The 'Brain Reading Machine' gave the opportunity to improvise and combine different animation techniques, as they attempt to 'produce a dazzling array of cartoons, exciting-police-dramas-like-on-the-TV, and a 'Proper Music Video'.
Will Bishop-Stephens has been working on kinetic sculptures he calls “Thrum” since 2020. Version IX links a bicycle wheel to a guitar. Butterfly wings, snail shells, poppy seed capsules and feathers grow and shrink on the spokes, the guitar strings produce a vibrating drone. The animation and sound machine takes us to a state of floating.
