A comparative analysis between ‘Ser Mot’ (2011) and Norman McLaren’s ‘Begone Dull Care’ (1949)
‘Ser Mot’ is a three minute long stop motion animation produced with stills cameras, tripods and a lot of patience. The visuals in the film, enhanced by experimental music and sounds, deal with the growth of nature. You see plants and other organic forms seemingly grow. The production of course was the opposite in that the plants were chopped millimeter-by-millimeter and photographed repetitively and reversed in the final post-production to give the illusion of growth. ‘Begone Dull Care’ is a eight minute long animation paired with music by the ‘Oscar Peterson Trio’ in which simple forms and vibrant colours dance and move to the tune of the music. The animation was made by drawing directly onto 35mm film. Colour is added later through various dupe prints assembled in parallel.
Both movies, as with most animations, had a very large production time – drawing out each frame individually requires this as does making a stop motion where one image is one frame. Differences in the process however can be seen in the structure and editing of the films. McLaren’s film had a very linear process in that he started drawing at the start of a reel and went through to the end. A regular occurrence in the production of animation is the use of key frames whereas McLaren’s “natural sequence” of production “seldom happens in film making” but, as he describes, this natural linear way of working “had a direct bearing on both the detailed and total continuity.” Similarly in ‘Ser Mot’ no key frames could be used to aid production as a ‘scene’ had to be shot from beginning to end because each was a one time deal due to the nature of the work. They differ in linearity, even though both follow this ‘start to finish’ mode, in a few various ways. Firstly the nature of producing ‘Ser Mot’ meant that the captured frames were reversed to create the effect of growth – this turns upside down the nature of start to finish. Secondly, the ‘footage’ collected for ‘Ser Mot’ was not done in a natural sequence and as each ‘scene’ was a stand alone they could be edited (post-production) in any manner or order. It is true that in production each scene had a beginning and end but there was the ability afterwards to chop up, make cuts to different angles or shots, breaking down the linear production nature. With ‘Begone’ the music was driving the narrative and so the frames had to stay in order to keep in time with the music.
A similarity between the films is the freedom that the filmmaker(s) had, in a more spontaneous creative way, because the films were made in real time. Without the aid of scripts or storyboards the maker was able to change decisions or make new ones as he went along. This is not to say that no pre-production occurred, as a lot of work went into the mapping of music for ‘Begone’ and with ‘Ser Mot’ there was pre-planning of how to attain the best effect and a scouting of locations before production. Both, however, were able to act on the fly during actual production and had no pre determined specifics when dealing with composition. With ‘Ser Mot’ and ‘Begone’ the composition of the ‘shots’ was an intuitive changing thing, even if a pre planned thought existed it could change dynamically. At one minute forty into ‘Ser Mot’ the is a scene where a small plant grows out and up from the bottom of the frame, the sky is visible and the background is framed by trees, the whole scene looks monotone. Towards the end colourful leaves appear on the plant adding a contrast to the monotone of before. This particular ‘shot’ was stumbled upon randomly and the composition set up on the fly.
Each of the films relies heavily upon music but in extremely different ways. ‘Begone’ is the music, it is driven by it and the visuals were tailored for it and born from it. Although highly important in ‘Ser Mot’ the music had no bearing on the actual production but instead was added later to enhance the film. Around two and a half minutes in to ‘Begone’ we see a yellow background with a blue strip filling the left side of the frame (about one third of the frame) and two potato like objects which start top left stationary but expanding slightly with four beats of the piano and then sliding down to the bottom right of the frame, in time with the piano as the notes slide from high to low, and afterwards repeating the four beats as previously heard. At around twenty seconds into ‘Ser Mot’ you see the branches of a bush come into focus and red and black large berries appearing in pops along the branches whilst over the music you can hear a rustling popping sound which was recorded and placed in that particular scene for effect. So you can see from the examples that one film is driven by the music/sound and the other uses it as a tool.
A huge difference in the films was the techniques used to create them. On one hand with ‘Ser Mot’ you have camera equipment, tripods and real things to be photographed again and again, not to mention computers and editing software to put the images together post-production. In comparison you have the more analog technique used in ‘Begone’ where a real piece of film was drawn upon by hand frame by frame with ink and a pen. The images in ‘Begone’ are man made, not taken from real life, and as a result quite inviting and mesmerizing. It is always intriguing to see the inanimate made animate even with simple lines and shapes. The interesting thing about ‘Ser Mot’ is that the images are made from real life but placed into the realm of the unreal in that they show something, or propose to show something, which we do not usually see. We cannot say that we regularly see change occurring in fact it is very rare. When we see footage of something in super slow motion or a time lapse of a flower blooming we are instantly intrigued because these are things we do not see every day.
A massive help to McLaren’s piece was the ability to correct mistakes by wiping clean the film – “one swipe of the damp cloth affected all the traditional processes from script through to negative cutting”. With ‘Ser Mot’ this was not possible, if a mistake was made like too big a cut of a plant then the shot was abandoned or would have to be re worked post-production. Often at times people were caught in one or two of the photographs, which could be amended by cutting out said photographs, as long as the effect was not too jumpy or unrealistic. McLaren says that “with hand drawn technique, one slows down, to observable speed, the world of frantic mobility” as with ‘Ser Mot’ the desired effect was to slow down but actually the post-production was about speeding up the process we had gone through. “When beginners draw footage by hand and the result is projected at normal speed, the image-flow is so fast that it gives the impression of looking at thought, if thought were visible” – we also had a problem in that when first playing back the images the sequences went very quickly at 15 fps and so we ended up slowing most down by fifty percent. This is something we were able to do as a fix whereas McLaren would have had to plan this from the beginning. That, however, was part of his pre-production set up with the music – “Measurements are put against the notes on a dope sheet, which is usually a simplified musical score, and, by subtraction, the length of each note in terms of frames is written in.”
+ Quotations taken from dossier on Norman McLaren from the reading list
