What is the film about?

The Lost Mariner is an animated interpretation of Dr. Oliver Sacks’ case study found in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It uses photographs to visualize the rare memory condition of patient Jimmie G.

What influenced it?

I was very inspired in terms of technique by Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film, and Yours Truly by Osbert Parker. Both of these films use photo cut-outs in unique ways.

A little background information...

I decided to make this film after re-reading Dr. Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. This particular case, described in Chapter 2, really stuck with me. It made me think fundamentally about what it means to be human, if one can no longer form new memories?

How was the film made?

I decided to use the theme of photographs to tell the story, as photographs are usually our most direct link with our past. This is taken to the extreme, so that in fact everything in the film is a photograph.I printed these images out small, and cut out all the actors. In this way I would have a stack of paper cut outs for one actor’s scene,” Martin recounts. “I then created the environment of the scene also out of paper cut outs — the wallpaper, the bed, the table, the props, etc. These were all set up on what’s called a multi-plane animation stand, which is a structure with glass layers with the camera pointing down. I then animated all the cut-outs, including the cut-outs of the actors, on the multi-plane stand. I also shot a few scenes using stacks of replaceable photos in real environments, like the bathroom sink and hallway.
Normally I work at 12 frames per second, but because of all the cutting involved in this film I halved the frame rate of many scenes so I my hand wouldn’t fall off,” Martin relates. “I would say the final film is made up of roughly 3,000 still images.