A new exhibition, which opens this Wednesday (1st) at Cinesesc, in the city of São Paulo, will honor the cartoonist and cartoonist Angeli and the cinema in stop motion, an animation technique that is filmed frame by frame to simulate movement. For this, Cinesesc is presenting replicas, scenarios, puppets and even a set footage, which were used in the production of the award-winning animation Spit Bob, We Don’t Like Peopledirected by Cesar Cabral.
The idea of the exhibition, called The Art of Stop Motion Animation, is to show audiences the laborious production required to create a film of this genre, which can take years. “O stop motion it’s a process in which you move a character frame by frame, photograph by frame. It is the principle of cinema: a sequence of images that generates the sensation of movement”, explained Cabral. “To get an idea of what it’s like to do stop motionon a good day of animation, where you work eight hours, three seconds of scene are produced”.
The exhibition was conceived by the director of the film and also by Ivan Melo. “Here is a bit of our production process. I always feel that the stop motion produces this charisma with the public, who want to see how animation is done”, said Cabral, in an interview with Brazil Agency.
“Here we are going to tell the whole trajectory: how to arrive at a set filming and how to produce an animation. Let’s first go through what art direction is, in which you start thinking about the drawings, also the production of the molds, the construction of the skeletons of the puppets, until the construction and assembly of the sets and a set filming with cameras and computers. I think people will leave here feeling and understanding what it’s like to do a stop motion”, he stated.
The goal, according to the director, is for people to be able to discover this universe and, who knows, start producing their own animations as well. “We want to put the seed of animation in the new generations. O stop motion it’s a difficult and expensive type of animation, but it has this special thing, the handmade process. More and more we see that he is there, as is the case with Pinocchioby Guillermo del Toro, which was nominated for an Oscar,” said Cabral.
The show features three exhibition rooms. In the waiting room at Cinesesc, some of the puppets that were used in the animation can be seen, such as Angeli himself and two of the most famous characters created by him: Bob Cuspe and Rê Bordosa. There is also a collection of small faces with open, closed and half-open mouths to show how a speech sequence of one of the characters is produced. It is in this room that there is also a wall full of licks with phrases that have already been used in Angeli’s strips.
In annex 1, a building next to the Sesc movie theater, replicas of a real puppet building workshop were installed, demonstrating how each one of them was produced from molds, silicone and metals. There, the public will discover that each part of the puppets’ body is made individually and only then fitted together using metals to be moved. This annex also shows the trophies won by this Brazilian animation and replicas of scenarios used in the film.
On the upper floor of Cinesesc there is a room that reproduces a set of filming, with the sets mounted, the camera installed and the computers accessible for editing and montage frame by frame.
Entry to the exhibition is free. Schools and groups can also visit it by prior arrangement. More information can be obtained from the site of the exhibition.