Nora Snyder

I am a stop motion animator. My work focuses on surreal narratives and experimental animation techniques. I use a wide variety of materials and techniques including three dimensional stop motion puppetry, paper cut outs, and manipulation of light and shadow puppetry. I am drawn to magical realism, folklore, and eerie aesthetics. My work explores themes of nature, entropy, and the contradictory horror and beauty of living inside a human body. I use my films to come to terms with the impermanence and instability of my body and the world around me– the unfairness of living in an imperfect body, the inevitability of death, and the impermanence of everything I love. I choose to work primarily in animation and stop motion puppetry because the medium itself reveals how a life can retain meaning even as the body decays. Though their time behind the camera is short, the lives of stop motion puppets only gain meaning through the lens of the eternal– when the film is finished and the frames are played back all at once. Though their bodies become garbage, their stories remain. My motive is to discover how my fleeting experiences on earth are connected with the ethos of eternity and the neverending cycles of growth and decay.