Arthur Conan Doyles story of The Lost World is brought to life using live animation and music by the members of The Paper Cinema. The story was told visually in as an animated film which was created by two animators using cardboard cut-outs drawn in black and white mainly against a black background. The scenes were played out in front of a video camera and transmitted to a large screen onstage via a live feed. The piece had the strange quality of a Méliès film mixed with an animated comic strip. It was essentially a silent film, with a soundtrack improvised live to a pre-set structure by one musician with several instruments and the aid of a recorded looping machine. The music stayed stuck in four-four time until it changed about two-thirds of the way through the piece. This lack of variety in basic rhythm didnt help advance the story. Nor did the animators choice not to use words as chapter headings or to pinpoint key moments of dialogue, as in many silent films. There was no narration, and only a few words were shown on screen either to frame the beginning and the end of the piece, or in the context of illustration. Thus, the audience generally had to follow the thread of the story in images alone. It is billed as a show for children aged 8+. Most people managed to and the older children in the audience enjoyed the scenes which involved trekking through the Amazonian jungle in search of dinosaurs and fighting with savage gorillas. The images were created in the same black and white pen and ink style, and although the scale of the pieces differed, and the amount of images shown was impressive, the way they were used failed to push the boundaries of the genre. The two performers never used more than four pieces of paper at any one time, and most of the time limited themselves to two or three. Scene changes were most effective when using cut-outs, in which one image was viewed through another and a pan effect led us through the cut-out. Another thing the animators experimented with which was particularly effective was to use different light sources. However, after a while, the limited techniques and materials used became repetitive, the use of an unchanging background (apart from an initial patterned image which was more effective) dragged on. There was no exploration of live drawing, for instance, no use of colour, gels, or in-depth exploration of different qualities of paper opaque, translucent, transparent. The show could have done with more variety of this kind. And the finished quality of some of the scenes left a bit to be desired. While small-scale blemishes would not necessarily have been noticed, bent edges, rough cut-out marks and rippled air bubbles on paper glued onto backing card appeared larger than life on the big screen. They could have been effects used consciously, but unfortunately they were obviously not. Despite limited variety in the musical soundscape, the retelling as a whole was completely devoid of emotion. Technical execution left a lot to be desired, with images falling short of the edges of the screen and animators fingers creeping into shot unintentionally.The Paper Cinema would do well to look at work done by German artists who work with paper and projection Gisela Oberbeck, or Angelika Hoffmann if they wish to push their boundaries further.
