Waiting for Godot

A — INSPIRATION

The existential crisis has followed me like a shadow. Death, freedom, loneliness, and worst of all meaninglessness — I have never known what to do with any of it. Self-salvation is nothing more than reading.

Sartre: existence precedes essence, so find your own meaning. Camus: it is meaningless, so hold it in contempt and enjoy the moment. I still can’t decide how to live. I’m the peasant under the withered tree, still waiting. I wanted that nihilistic comedy to be light, so: stop motion.

B — SCRIPT, STORYBOARD AND CONFIGURATION

Waiting for Godot is a two-act tragicomedy and the animation keeps that structure. Stop motion and length forced the plot down to almost nothing, so all of it goes to the protagonists’ state — a footnote on people passing and time going.

The set stays simple: a dead tree, scattered branches and leaves, a black curtain. Both protagonists are the same not-so-smart farmer, separated only by height, weight, skin and clothes.

C — PROP MAKING

Skeleton first, then the general shape, then the face and hands. The dead tree is wire and clay, textured with a spatula and coloured with acrylic. Leaves are paper; stones are foam glue.

D — FILM STILLS

The loop, from open to close: they sigh, scratch and fidget, question passersby, wait for Godot. Despair arrives, they try to end it, they fail.

It repeats twice. We know it goes on forever — them, and you and me in front of the screen.

E — FINAL OUTCOME

Clay is not good at joy, anger, sorrow. Early black-and-white silent film turned out to be the reference — Chaplin became almost a pure symbol of feeling, his body not part of the narrative but the emotion itself.

Those minimal sets leaned entirely on performance to imply context, and clay works the same way: feeling externalised as form, rhythm and texture. I tried to think the way a child does. Shot in a photography classroom with an iPhone and a few fill lights.