I have created a stop motion animation that revolves around a story. A message trapped inside a bottle frees itself in order to fulfill its own ambitions.
Coupled with a part of Claude Debussy’s Ballade, this short video is a poem unto itself. Using over a thousand images, I wanted this stop-motion animation to have a broken quality to emphasize the paper boats fragility. It’s journey follows a path over obstacles and open land. It is the quest of the little boat and the story’s climax that I want to focus on in this work. I want this video to have a surreal and dreamlike quality with this paper boat traveling through reality.
The message that the boat is composed of is actually a poem by Mary Oliver. I never intended the viewer to be able to read the poem, but the poem holds great importance to me. Understanding the video doesn’t require that you need to know the poem, but it does add another dimension. So here is Mary Oliver’s The Journey.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
