Stuck Between
A Paper Collage Stop-Motion Animation Retelling of Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
Given the project titled “Liminality & Transition,” we were asked to explore the concept of liminality. After researching its meaning, I found that it describes a transitional state of being “in between.” The term comes from anthropology and refers to moments when people exist between two stages of life, identity, or experience. Victor Turner described liminal states as “neither here nor there, betwixt and between.” Through design, live interaction, documentation, and literature, the project was meant to exist within that liminal space.
As inspiration, we were given excerpts from Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman to incorporate into our project’s mood and design. While shuffling through the pages, the closing remarks in the prologue resonated deeply, and it felt natural to base my project around them.
For personal context, over the past three years I have been in a state of limbo — dreaming big, pushing myself out of my comfort zone, and exploring further than I ever thought possible. When I read the line:
“His dreams have worn him out, exhausted him so that he sometimes cannot tell whether he is awake or asleep. But the dreaming is Finished. Out of many possible natures of time, imagined in as many nights, one seems compelling. Not that the others are impossible. The others might exist in other worlds.”
I felt seen, and even a bit self-conscious about how literally it reflected my life. Over the past year in the MFA program, while working overnight full-time, I have worked through both night and day to the point where space and time have seemingly blurred.
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I knew immediately that I wanted this project to reflect my personal experience with liminality, while also pushing myself into new creative territory — specifically, paper collage stop-motion animation, a medium I had not yet explored.
To begin the creation process, I started digitally by selecting a photo of myself sitting on a bench overlooking the Grand Canyon in 2023. From there, I isolated the bench and my figure, placing them onto a floating piece of land to create a blank-slate platform where I could experiment with different backgrounds.
After creating sixteen different sky and space scenes with myself in the foreground, I began printing multiple copies of each. I then tore and cropped out my figure, allowing the imperfections and variations of each rip to reinforce the theme of liminality. Once the eighty colorful copies were diversely torn, I printed and cut lines from the full quote in Einstein’s Dreams, preparing them to be photographed and compiled into the second phase of the project: stop-motion animation.
With every frame digitally archived, I moved into editing in Premiere Pro, shaping a video that could carry the emotional weight of the quote. I set the sequence to 12 frames per second, allowing each randomized still image to appear for three frames — just long enough to be perceived, but not fully analyzed, echoing the fleeting nature of dreams.
The final touches — melodic music, color correction, and rendering — came through a process of trial and error. While the project challenged me technically, I found myself deeply invested in refining it to match my vision. In the end, the one-minute video brings the excerpt from Einstein’s Dreams to life, illustrating the quiet power of existing in the in-between. If you want to take a look yourself, here’s the link: https://youtu.be/iut6iBmow3c
