Theproject-1486298917

World in (stop)Motion is a project of an itinerant and participative animated series, entirely made in stop-motion. For those who ask, stop-motion is a traditional animation technique consisting in taking a series of photographies, slightly moving or modifying the subject between each shot : when put one after another, those pictures form a video giving the illusion of movement.

The story of the series is about Gaïa, a young woman who decides to go travelling alone around the world. Each episode of the series will show a step of her trip.

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Alongside this fictional journey, there is our own trip : We, Chloé and Violette, will travel in our little van with all the equipment needed for the making of the episodes, and we will go to meet interested, curious and motivated people who would like to take part in our project.

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This means that at each main stop of the trip, we will organize a creation and directing workshop, in which we will invite a group of people to make a set and other characters and objects to animate, with what they have to hand.

So it is this temporary team who will be in charge of creating the universe of the episode. And our character will come and act in this universes according to the ideas, rules and indications defined by the group.

World in (Stop)Motion is also a website, on which you will be able to follow Gaïa’s adventure, and ours. We will post on it each episode as soon as it’s done. And you will also find there many other informations about the people taking part in the workshop, about the shooting place, also some making-of pictures...

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Our idea was born from a wish to use stop-motion as way of meeting people.

We would like people’s imagination to be the driving force of the project.

Our intention is to share our passion and our skills with different people, but without forcing them to use too specific techniques or materials. It is about letting their creativity speak, according to their culture and environment.

What we are interested in, is to see how the world they create can reflect both their individual imagination and the influence of their culture.

It will show through the ideas they come with, but also through the objects and materials they choose to use.

About the scenario, the idea is to always act in a collaborative way, always adapting to the ideas and perspectives of the people we will be in front of. In this way, Gaïa will travel through the imagination of the different people just like we will travel through those different countries. Just like us, she will be confronted with unfamiliar surroundings and will have to adapt to them and interact with them.

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Stop-motion is a traditional animation technique, mainly manual and pretty intuitive, because the animator is in direct contact with the animated object. Moreover, a stop-motion animation can be made out of any object or material, without a too specific knowledge: it makes it a technique reachable by everyone, and easily practicable with a group.

We want to keep in the project the principle of recovered materials and recycled objects. Of course, Gaïa is built in a more technical way, with a professional armature, to make her solid enough to handle the whole trip. But we still wanted to create a link with the idea of recovered material, and that is why we decided to reuse one of Chloé’s films speciality: the light switch head.

If you want to check out more precisely how Gaïa was made, you can find a making-of on our website!

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The very principle of the project leads each episode to be very different from one another, and never perfectly matching the previous or next one. But it’s precisely this heterogeneous aspect that we like, and we want to play with it and highlight it.

That is why we would like to get as much variety as possible in the groups taking part in the workshops. Some episode will be made by children, others by adults or teenagers; sometimes, we will collaborate with animation students, almost professional in this field, and some other times, with people who never held a camera in their life.

But it is important not to forget that it is a series, so that it is necessary to have a red thread, a unity in the finish.

It s our character, Gaia, who will create this unity. First by her own presence, because she is the heroin and stays in the centre of each episode. But we also want to create a unity and a stability through her acting, her way of moving and behaving.

Indeed, for each episode, we will let the participants animate their own characters, so the movements will then be more or less well controlled according to the people’s background. But it will always be one of us two who animate Gaia, sono matters if her environment is smooth or clumsy, she will always have the same fluidity in her movements, the same type of attitudes and reaction to external events, according to the personality we gave her from the very beginning.

The difference between the animation of Gaia and her environment’s will be more or less visible in the different episodes, and will give its particularity to each episode and to the series in general.

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As mentioned above, we don't have any restriction about the type of people taking part in our workshops. Quite the opposite! The only limit will be the amount of people per workshop. As it is a quite precise project, where all the participants have to collaborate on one single script and one set, having too many people at the same time could easily make it much less efficient and fun. Ideally, we would like to work with no more than 5 person at one time. But then again, we are flexible! Depending on the time we have and the people present, we can consider other configurations, like sharing more the tasks between scenario, set making and animation, or even staying longer to make many episodes at the same place.

Depending on all of this, the workshops should last between 2 days (the minimum to get to a production which makes sense!) and one week (which would allow us to take the time to create more detailed and complex world and script).

Ideally we would like to do mainly volunteering workshops, in order to really let everyone participate. But if we leave with a too tight budget, we will have to find more professional partnerships with official organisations or schools who could pay us. So it is all going to depend on the result of this collect.

And to answer the question you are all waiting to ask: the itinerary is not precisely determined yet. We know that we want to go everywhere (that’s a good start), but we are still waiting for what the funding will give us. Through this crowdfunding, we also really hope to get in touch with interested people, who could also influence our itinerary.

If you live somewhere in Europe and if you want to take part in our workshops as an association, school, festival or as a single person, or if you know someone who could be interested, please don't hesitate to contact us. We will do our best to make it possible.

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Chloé Alliez was born in France in 1988, in the middle of the surfers from the Basque coast. Yet she takes a completely different path: art. She first studies illustration in Saint-Luc Brussels, and then turns to the dark side of animation. She stays 4 years locked in a dark room to make her stop-motion short films. In June 2015, she proudly obtains her last diploma. In the 6 short films she has made, we can notice a certain weakness for everyday life objects in her sets and characters. Watch out your light switches if you come across her!

Violette Delvoye is sometimes belgian, sometimes french, depending on the days. After a few years in walloon territory, she escapes at sea with the rest of her family. She lives 5 years of her youth on a sailing boat around the world, before joining the Breton coast. But she has a secret passion: animation ! In 2012, she obtains an animation diploma in ESAAT (France). She keeps on studying in Volda University College in Norway, a year during which she experiments many techniques of traditional animation. In 2013, she happily joins the school of La Cambre, where she makes 3 short films, always with different techniques.

We meet in La Cambre in 2014, and our shared interest for stop-motion quickly leads us to collaborate on each other's projects. After our studies, we wanted to bring this collaboration a bit further and give it different shapes, and this is how World in (Stop)Motion was born.

Aside from this project, we are currently leading together stop-motion workshops for a group of autistic children.

The collect continues its frantic race! So as there are still 19 days remaining, why not trying to go even further?

With even more budget, we could not only buy the van and make it drive, but also go for a real long journey (we aim 6 months), during which wewill do plenty of volunteering workshops! It would also allow us to buy more material and equipement for the workshops (aluminimum wire, silicone, glues, but also speakers to screen our productions it better conditions, etc...)

Anyway, we are already very happy about this collect and all the positive feedbacks we got. It really is very encouraging! Again, a huge thank you to everybody!

World in (Stop)Motion

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