Artist’s Context – Stop Motion Video: The Dead Cat Society

In trawling my brain trying to remember things that may help others understand the context of what’s going on here, it’s worth knowing I made this animated film with the group in mind, rather than the general public. It’s full of those in-jokes that we found funny at the time, but that outsiders may not really understand.

How did it all begin? With a well known saying in the forces ringing in my ears: never volunteer. A visual arts mentor asked me if I’d assist in producing a film utilising the ‘Personal Super-hero’ puppets crafted from scrap materials that program participants had made in a whole-of-program creative session.

I soon discovered ‘assist‘ translated into writing, drawing, filing, editing and producing the film, with some help eventuating later when others could spare the time!

With a general idea of taking inspiration from the ‘character’ I could divine from the figures, either by how they looked or from asking the creator what personality they thought their creation had, it quickly became clear I had to not only include every figure, but also quickly pare them down to avoid confusion. Thus was born the idea to stage it as a murder mystery, with tons of deaths to clear the way for the main characters to tell the story.

When I casually asked how long the film should be — and was told “no more than four minutes” — I at first assumed that would be too short. Then I filmed my first scene. Half a day for thirty seconds. The whole film was shot using my iPad and anything I could find lying around, as by this point the whole visual arts budget had been blown other projects.

The title was inspired by a comment that tickled us during a session and seemed to irk the facilitator, one of those exercises where you say a word or phrase and it goes around the room. Needless to say once we noticed the offending words “dead cat” caused mild anarchy, we kept repeating it – an in-joke to describe the latest intake of nutters!