harvey @ deneroff.com

The Madness of Being, a striking short film  Hal Miles made last year, recently finished doing the festival circuit. Its about a character (a stop motion armature) trapped in a situation right out of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit; Miles describes the story as being about a “character … confined in an extremely small and isolated room for all eternity, [who] confronts its madness of being by witnessing a series of agonizing situations about itself.” The fact that the character is essentially the skeleton of a stop motion puppet (modeled on one used in Mighty Joe Young), might be considered a meditation on the madness of filmmaking.

Hal Miles is someone I had the pleasure of getting to know when I worked in the Savannah campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he teaches stop motion animation and visual effects. Early in his career, he worked under Tex Avery and later befriended Ray Harryhausen, who he claims as major influences. His credits include working on the visual effects of such films as The Abyss, Terminator II and Titanic, as well as animating the Pillsbury Doughboy and directing several of his own short films.

For me, Hal is the go to person on questions on puppet animation; his passion for his history and technique is reflected in his wonderful collection of stop motion artifacts (which naturally supplied the armature used in The Madness of Being). His long-term plan is to open a stop motion museum. (Interestingly, his new wife, Nancy, is herself a collector of animation art, though it’s obvious that theirs is not a marriage of convenience.)

The dark mood of The Madness of Being seems out of character for such a lively person; as his wife Nancy says, who knew that such a funny person could make such a film. Well, he did and did a pretty good job of it too.

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