Magda (2004)
October 14, 2004Release Date
Plot.
Where to Watch.
Cast & Crew.
Joe Frank
Narrator / Writer
Paul Harrod
Ring Master (voice)
Chel White
Street Man (voice) / Director / Producer / Editor
Mark Eifert
Director of Photography
Jeff Riley
Animation
Teresa Drilling
Animation
Bartek Prusiewicz
Art Direction
Steve Miller
Editor
Media.
Details.
This Movie Is About.
Wiki.
Magda is a 2004 stop motion animated short film by independent filmmaker Chel White, from a story written and read by monologist Joe Frank.
A first love is corrupted as a man recalls his affair with a beautiful circus contortionist in this stop-motion animation of wooden manikins.
Short of the Week's Serafima Serafimova describes Magda as "A love story so beautiful and incredibly touching in its simplicity… it’s a real gem of untarnished beauty."
Visually, the film explores the use of extreme telephoto lenses, creating enigmatic scenes that reveal themselves over time, and ghostly figures drifting in-and-out of focus. Animation World Network describes the aesthetic as "swimming in the rack-focus sea of a telephoto lens with an extremely shallow depth of field. This can feel like the equivalent of driving through a thick fog, but it is also a very efficient means of directing the eye to the relevant action in some very busy sets." The characters in the film are derived from basic, pose-able wooden manikins found in any art supply store, but extensively redesigned and rigged to be usable as stop motion puppets.