The Tell Tale Heart
Roles: Writer/Director/Animator/Cinematographer

This is easily the biggest, and arguably the best, project Waddling has taken on so far. Our adaptation of this classic Poe story began as founder Fred's dissertation for university, with a main crew of just three people, Producer/Designer Bronwen Herdman, Sound designer and Composer James Morrigan and Writer/Director/Animator and Cinematogrpaher Fred Pugh. The film was animated by Fred, primarily in an unused changing room at universrity and later in his accomodation bedroom, in around 8-weeks and on a budget of about £200. Over a year of recovering, composing, editting and crying later, The Tell-Tale Heart is available to watch in full here, and on our YouTube channel. Enjoy!

Based on previous experience doing stop-motion solo with ‘Sporf’, I decided to bring in some help to make the project the best it could be. Bronwen Herdman was brought in before the script was fully realized. This was so we could begin visualising the project as early as possible and start to plan what would be possible with our budget, time and expertise. Bronwen later moved into a producing role due to her knowledge in the practical areas of building the sets, puppets and props and how we would source the materials on such a tight budget. 

Jack Mitchell was hired as a composer and sound designer to give life to the film. He also, was brought in earlier in the process than perhaps would be normal so that we could collaborate the animation, design and sound together keeping a consistent feel across the piece. Last but far from least Jo and Kirsty where brought in to build some of the larger more intricate props including the fire place and oven.

The piece takes a lot from the German expressionism movement originating in post-war Germany which Studio Binder describes as “visualising the country's collective anxiety through distorted and nightmarish imagery,” (Binder, 2022) primarily in the design and also in our use of shadow and horror. While it is an animation which are most commonly aimed at younger or family audiences we didn’t want to shy away from the horror and macabre writing that Poe is celebrated for. The Exorcist, The Shining and The Lighthouse being primary horror influences for the piece with specific visual references to both The Exorcist and The Shining being made and narrative and audio inspiration being taken from Eggers modern surrealist classic The Lighthouse.

The Excorcist

The Killing Scene - TTH

The Kubrick Stare

The Puppet Stare - TTH

These are some of the early designs of characters and sets, by Bronwen. The main character (Young) was moddled on Edgar Allan Poe and Victor from Corpse Bride. His movements, which we nailed down later but, factored into his lanky frame where moddled on Jack Skellington From A Nightmare Before Christmas.  

Early on the kitchen and living room where all one room as this was more period acurate. We changed this to have the Old man be from past wealth, giving him a large house that we could conciously under fill with furniture in order to create a more spacious enviroment to animate in as well as a more barren creepy atmosphere.

Just before the monologue in the piece we transition to a shot of Young fully breaking down and jumping from his chair. This is one of the only non-static shots in the film. Being a stop-motion made on no budget I was using a camera on a tripod for every shot so I didn’t have the ability to employ pans and shakes how I would like, I knew I needed to do something drastically different for this shot though. Inspired by the handheld filming style used in M.O.D.O.K (Blum & Barbanell, 2020) I wanted to attempt to recreate that digitally using a static shot. Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sijll lists handheld shooting as one of the top one hundred most important film techniques and describes its dramatic value as follows “A handheld shot is often used to suggest instability. It is especially effective when contrasted to a stable image” (Van Sijll, 2005). In “The Tell-Tale Heart” we contrast this shot directly with a shot of the police sitting confused, static, and the entire rest of the film, all static and cold juxtaposed with this one chaotic, shaky shot.