Stop Motion Geek

Captain 3D in Haegelin's  Captain 3D . Source: Vimeo. Snatching a moment’s respite, a moment now drawing to a close, animation director Victor Haegelin—sporting wide-rimmed 3D glasses with big, red and blue lens—flips through the last few pages of a comic book boasting in big, red letters, “Captain 3D.” He reclines in a leather-backed computer chair, sitting at his desk, every inch of it crammed with something , though what exactly is anyone’s guess, stocked as it is with an animator’s lightbox, a glass jar filled to overflowing with colored pencils that lies an arm’s distance from of a litany of neatly stacked books and magazines—complete with a smattering with glossy comics coated in celluloid—the array finished off with every creator’s most essential companion: a sketch-pad and pen, the items lying closest at hand. Victor Haegelin in Captain 3D . Source: Vimeo. Victor Haegelin closing the cover on the "Captain 3D" comic in Captain 3D . Source: Vi...

A Dutch family as seen in Nieuwstad (New City) . Photo courtesy of Roos Mattaar. In the twelfth century, a Dutch peasant family of three – mother, father, and son, each clad in rough-spun wool tunics, the mother in a broad-brimmed white bonnet and apron ­– living on wetlands of the small peasant village of Paveien in Netherlands, just outside of the town of Culenborch (modern-day “Culemborg”) and the village of Lanxmeer, are themselves a strange distillation of their surroundings. To our twenty-first century eyes, their lives – from birth to death – are shaped so starkly by the world in which they live – a world of toil and soil, with the stuff plagued by uncertain flooding patterns and gray, gray weather. With the benefit of hindsight and an eye looking back from the twenty-first century, everything from their clothes to their very way of life – one of mere survival, of settling wild lands by building house and barn and then cultivating the land remaining – has a look and f...