The Impossible Qualities Of Illusionary Spaces: Stop Motion Animation, Visual Effects And Metalepsis

Abstract

This thesis examines stop motion animation, its role as a special effect and how the stop motion form impacts on narrative. In particular, it is concerned with the relationship between stop motion animation and the rhetorical concept of metalepsis, as well as the disruption and transgression of narrative spaces in fiction. The studio component of the work is an installation titled All The Nice Things Come From Here which uses an early film special effects technique, the Schüfftan process. The Schüfftan process is a form of in-camera compositing that uses mirrors to align two separate spaces to form the illusion of one cohesive space. The installation uses Newcastle’s light industrial landscape as a backdrop to create impossible miniature narrative spaces that can only be understood when the viewer is aligned to a station point forced by the placement of the mirrors. The theoretical portion of the thesis examines how this exploded view of an animated special effect can be used to explore ideas of narrative, narrative layers and the visual forms of stop motion animation. The thesis argues that object stop motion animation has aspects that are inherently metaleptic, as stop motion’s use of real objects doing impossible things creates its own subtle and impossible metaleptic spaces that simultaneously refer to both the world within the film and the world outside the film.