Stop Motion in Main Stream Media (PES)

One of the best known stop motion directors in current pop culture is Adam Pesapane better known as his directing alter ego PES. Pes's animations are immediately recognisable, many of his shorts use everyday household items to represent something else. His first film Roof Sex, depicts two arms chairs sneaking off to a roof top and having sex, the film won PES his first  Annecy International award for best film and has been screened at over 100 film festivals internationally. 

Another example and perhaps my favourite piece of stop motion by PES is his 2008 short Western Spaghetti. This film shows a meal being made, however the ingredients are substituted for items such as pin cuisines used to represent tomatoes, crayons as spaghetti, and bubble wrap to simulate boiling water etc. This video won the 2009 june Audience Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, and got a mention at the Sundance film festival. This film was one of the first stop motion animations that really got me interested in the whole stop motion medium. 

Pes is also attributed to having the shortest film ever nominated for an Academy Award. His 2012 short, Fresh Guacamole lasts only 1 minute 40 seconds and again shows everyday objects representing ingredients to make guacamole. When different ingredients are cut up they turn into something else, often with a visual pun behind them. For example when a baseball is diced up it change's into dice, and at the end Poker chips are laid out on a plate to represent Potato chips. 

PES has been heavily influenced by Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer who's work can be compared to PES's. You can see where PES has been influenced from his style, Jan's film 'Breakfast' is a brilliant example of surrealist stop motion, where in a man sits at a table and inserts money into another mans eyes, a plate of food is then revealed from the mans abdomen being drawn up from somewhere on strings. This style of using one object to represent something else, in this case a man to represent a vending machine is seen all through out PES's work.