Translated: Ant and Worm Go West. 1998. This is the animation I got my independent film production name from: Mutant Worm. Quite an oldie by now. It was even edited on a non-linear video table, shot in super VHS. Remarkably, it was able to edit as close as one frame per image. It’s based on a fable by Toon Tellegen. The power of animation was fascinating to behold. I’ve been very appreciative of the craft ever since and would love to one day do a bigger project. My, how the days are short.

SYNOPSIS
‘ANT AND WORM GO WEST’
Ant and Worm encounter a wall in the forest. Ant refuses to budge.

ABOUT
This flick spawned the name MUTANT WORM. It is a stop-motion animation done on video and edited in linear fashion during my time at the USVA Video Collective.

It’s based on a fable by Toon Tellegen so I hope I’ll be allowed to show this here. Two more stories were filmed back then but with real people. Esther chose to do ours in clay. Thanks Esther.

Building the set and animating (done very crudely and without any previous clay experience) took us several weeks of appointments at Esther’s place. We build the set on a table at her house and kept the clay-puppets in her fridge. The story is actually about a squirrel and an ant. The squirrel features regularly in Toon’s stories. So Jacob set about making a squirrel and I made the ant. Esther and Karin worked on the set mostly. The squirel turned out … well, a squirrel – totally unanimatic! Jacob went claying something else, dissappointed, I think, therapeutically. And out came the mutant worm!

I made up a title tune on the guitar inspired by the one for Pippi Longstockings.

CREW
Jacob Veldema
Karin van der Laan
Esther Hoppenbrouwers
Frank Boxman
I dug up some setfootage of the first Mutant Worm animation, a clay animation: Mier en Worm Go West (Ant and Worm Go West). This was in the beginning of 1998.