FILM AS FETISH in Stop Frame Animation. A little story inspired by Ayka Yasis's super fierce
"J'adore PORN" gown.

Stephen Dirkes: Director/music/edit
Tal Shpantzer: Photography talfoto.com
cast:
jessyka dennis as the pornographer
susan merenda as porn star
james davenport as porn star
"J'adore PORN" evening gown and hooded overcoat:
ayka yasis aykaayka.com
make-up: cassandra renee cassandrarenee.carbonmade.com
hair: ronnie dieterich

With Ayka's gown as a starting point, I wanted to create/explore the character who would wear this beautiful/provocative/ ironic "J'adore PORN" garment in a literal and declamatory way. I took "PORN" to refer specifically to Filmed erotica and further for the character to eroticize the film making process as fetish in and of itself. Because my main ambition was to get across the sensuality of her fetish and not the actual "content" of her pornography, I made a point of not showing the "pornstars" very graphically. I had Harold Pinter's playlet, "Trouble in the Works" and the films, "Snake of June" and "Peeping Tom" in mind whilst editing.

For sound design, I wanted to work with a few intimate/ "quiet" sounds like door creeks, projector rattle, razor blades and gasps, non-diegetically in the music score. Other than the down tempo groove, boom bass and string swells, I used several FX elements in a "Composed" or musical way. The door creek, slam and projector FX all land in the tempo of the track and the projector FX is tuned and played at different pitches. Tal got some great close-ups of the xacto blade and I wanted some brittle tine sounds ( like making a thumb piano from xacto blades ) to play the main melody and bring out a tactile sensuality to the blade on film. I found a really bright, over-compressed sample of plucking guitar strings above the nut at the head stock ( sound pretty erotic, no? ) to bring your ear as close to the blade as your eye. There is also a purely musical reference in the toy piano element to the tendency in "dub-step" music to pair a huge, dark bassline with a naive, slightly goofy piano skank.

This was shot stop-motion on a Canon 5D (no video) at our Greenpoint Studio. All light was from a single L.E.D. Zylight Z90. I didn't colourise, but tuned the Zylight for colour and desaturated the image for the B&W "8mm" sequences. I built a small flag that attached to the Zylight via a flash bracket which allowed me to smoothly slide it horizontally in front of the light to get some film noir/broken shutter effects. Had other lights to work with , but loved the look of the Zylight and the flexibility of cool-lighting. Thanks scribemedia.org for the loan. As a personal note on the colour; I spent many nights in Maine, in the woods, in a trailer, watching 16mm films from the personal archive of Shane T. Doyle and really loved the look of film gone "RED". Film heads, you know what I mean.

I wanted to avoid using a "film-look" plug-in to simulate a projected film effect. So much "herky-jerky" motion was created by Tal's hand held slow frame rate sequences and the moving light, I ran the animation a little slow to amply the effect and desaturated sections to further delineate the "film within a film" vibe.