Another Dress, Another Button 2:45 HD video 2011
A stop-motion animation about spare buttons and the people who save them.
My first stop-motion animation! I’d had this accumulation of spare buttons for years, along with the vague idea of making an essay-type movie about them, but it wasn’t until the summer of 2010 that I realized that stop-motion was the way to do it. I wanted to give these forever-waiting buttons, isolated in their careful little bags, some active time in the world. The audio is excerpts from interviews I did with three women about how they deal with spare buttons, both practically and emotionally. Joe Mayo was the director of photography, and he and I co-designed the animation, but the Pong sequence was totally Joe’s idea.
The look and approach of the film are inspired by Ron McAdow’s genius 1974 stop-motion short Hank the Cave Peanut. Ron’s film is a brilliant example of animation creating complex inner lives for faceless objects (peanuts), and it also creates appealing sets out of quotidian objects, two things I was aiming for in this film.
