The cartographer

Stop motion animation is a filmic form where the combination of miniaturized worlds and stylized movement create a particular and specific affect. Contemporary digital production techniques have significantly expanded the visual vocabulary of independent film makers, allowing the creation of more ambitious and complex filmic worlds. The Cartographer is a short stop motion animated film that uses a hybrid analogue-digital form to explore narrative ideas about place and identity through an innovative combination of the handmade and the high tech. This research explores a hybrid visual style that combines traditional stop motion animation, a form that traditionally celebrates the handmade and the miniature with emerging digital technology. Using a combination of traditional puppet animation and digitally composited backgrounds the production was able to expand the visual scope of the film to bring a cinematic storytelling style to the visually rich medium of stop motion animation, exploiting the narrative capacity of both forms.