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In 2021, with UK Covid restrictions putting plans for his creative collaborations on hold, British artist and musician Peter Beatty decided to take the plunge into animation. He wanted to create an animated film as a music video to accompany a song he had written called Tell Me Where to Go; and to make things extra interesting (and complicated!) he decided to shun modern digital approaches and instead to build a multiplane camera – a meticulous, painstaking system for stop motion animation invented by Disney Studios in the 1930s and now rarely used. He then set to work animating with his film-making/photographer friend Joseph Boyle. Neither had made a stop motion animation before.

And what’s more, the pair were also doing all this entirely off-shore! Aboard a steel barge moored on a stretch of London canal where Peter also lives.

Painstakingly, for months and then years, the narrow living space of Nightjar was reinvented as a studio, slowly bringing to life a story about an astronomer, who embarks on a fantastic voyage hurtling into the universe on his sailboat. In the process – keeping costs down and using all materials at their disposal - they became especially good at special effects. Crumbled toilet paper delivers a dust they use to create constellations, the junkshop antique parts of a watchmaker form a golden telescope, all in dreamlike landscapes assembled from Peter’s delicately created artwork.

Finally the film is finished – and has won 7 international awards (and counting).

This edition of the In The Studio takes listeners on board ‘Studio Nightjar’ to look at the multiplane at work. Using conversations, audio-diaries, and sounds of canal-life it’s a frame-by-frame immersion in the crafting of an animation that became no less than an obsession to its makers, through record-breaking heatwaves and rainstorms.

Presenter/producer: Antonia Quirke
Executive producer: Stephen Hughes

(Photo: Peter Beatty. Credit: Oliver Twitchett)