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Varsity 3 Friday, April 13, 2018 - 3:40 PM  add this block to your calendar
Two Balloons
Short Docs & Stories: About Family
Narrative Short
9 minutes
2017
Director(s): Mark C. Smith
USA
 
Synopsis
Made in Portland, Oregon, this stop-motion animated film tells the story of two adventurous lemurs who navigate their handmade dirigibles around the world. Eventually they return to each other—to a place crossed by stars and clouds where love is at the center of everything—to a place where happenstance and fate threaten to disrupt their reunion. 
Director's Statement

My wife and I spent a winter refitting a sailboat and then sailed to Grenada. On one of the passages I saw a funnel cloud for the first time and that’s when the idea for Two Balloons happened. We made clouds from dry ice and wool, captured lightning from a Tesla Coil, and constructed a 350 square-foot ocean that undulated via push-rods and a step motor. It took four winters to reach Grenada and four years to reach the last frame of Two Balloons. 
Animated Worlds: Stop-Motion Classics with Mark Shapiro
Animated Worlds: with Mark Shapiro
Narrative Short
76 minutes
2017
Director(s): Various
USA, Various
 
Synopsis
Eric Leighton: One Frame of Animation | Director: LAIKA | 5 min Animator Eric Leighton takes a bouncy journey around a unique set on LAIKA’s Coraline production. 

Closed Mondays | Directors: Bob Gardiner, Will Vinton | 8 min A man sees the art come to life while he is at a museum. 

Fresh Guacamole | Director: PES | 2 min
An unseen cook uses unusual ingredients in his guacamole. 

Neighbours | Director: Norman McLaren | 8 min
Neighbors feud over a simple flower. 

Creature Comforts | Director: Nick Park | 5 min
A humorous and thought-provoking view of what animals in zoos might be thinking about their captivity and surroundings. 

Head Over Heels | Director: Timothy Reckart | 10 min
A man lives on the floor while his estranged wife lives on the ceiling. 

Vincent | Director: Tim Burton | 6 min
Vincent dreams of being like actor Vincent Price and loses himself in macabre daydreams. 

Western Spaghetti | Director: PES | 2 min
Everyday objects become delicious ingredients as we learn how to cook spaghetti through stop-motion photography. 

Noah’s Ark | Director: Bill Justice for the Walt Disney Company | 19 min 
Noah gets the word: build an ark in seven days.
 
Bottle | Director: Kirsten Lepore | 5 min
A transoceanic conversation between two characters via objects in a bottle. 

Late Edition—Conversation Pieces | Directors: Peter Lord, David Sproxton | 5 min 
An exclusive look behind the scenes of a magazine production. 

Nailed It | Director: LAIKA | 1 min
A Zombie, a pommel horse, and Olympic dreams. 
From LAIKA’s Mark Shapiro: When Animating Life, The Art, Science, and Wonder of LAIKA opened at the Portland Art Museum, I dreamed of putting together a canon of great stop-motion shorts that would exemplify the format’s unbelievable talent, storytelling, and art. Of course, editing it down to one block of films was the greatest challenge. What unifies these films? Tactile puppets and props and, in every case, a human hand guiding them frame-by-frame. 
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