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# 8 16-08-2010 , 10:06 PM
elephantinc's Avatar
Level 32 pachyderm
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: England
Posts: 1,859
Well for me, it's a mixture of three things:

1) Memories of the old ringmaster at blackpool tower circus, he was really good at being an evil b*stard and being mean to Mookey (the clown)
2) Once while in France I turned on the tv and there was an elephant in a circus on dancing, with the ringmaster instructing it and it really looked miserable.... user added image . No circuses in this country have elephants anymore but the same isn't true for countries like France (ironic considering where Cirque du Soleil came from (a circus with absolutely no animals))
3) My first ever stop motion short. My mum bought me some plastercine for my birthday and I had some pretty colourful colours but despite this, still made elephants out of them. "The only place you would find elephants that colourful is in a circus". So I just started messing around, and did a very short animation with the 4 elephants juggling, balancing on a ball etc. Then I went to 'range' in search of more plastercine and they had a starter kit with some strange varieties of blue, yellow and red and a bottle of varnish (seemed strange to me too). Continue with the circus films and because I like them and because I could use the varnish to make them look wet, I decided to make sealions. And this sort of continued until I had a full circus full of animals and a ringmaster. I was quite eager to make a stop motion animation and just started doing stuff, with no planning or forethought. I ended up with a sort of beginning of animal farm type affair, with the animals eventually overthrowing the evil ringmaster that imprisoned them. I couldn't have an animal as the villain, so it had to be the human. This has sort of come out of that. Even though I did the voice, the sealions cries of pain still haunt me...


https://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/as28g11/

Last edited by elephantinc; 16-08-2010 at 10:17 PM.