Materials girl: Hayley Morris

People who talk about embracing the slow life and getting back to nature could take a leaf (or two) out of NERD animation director Hayley Morris’s book. 

The woodland setting of her studio in Vermont is more than just a peaceful backdrop to the painstaking craft of stop-motion animation; it’s also a rich source of free materials and creative inspiration. 

I gather all this stuff, put it on my desk and then the act of manipulating the material [makes] the characters emerge.

When a brief lands on Morris’ desk, her first move is rarely to reach for a pen and sketchpad. Often, she’ll head out into the forest with her four-year-old daughter, basket in hand, to forage for pine cones, seed pods, leaves, mushrooms and moss. 

Above: The dazzlingly multimedia, multi-textured music video for the Iron and Wine track Joy. 

“I love finding different materials that will pick up the light in a really interesting way or bring a tactile element. I gather all this stuff, put it on my desk and then the act of manipulating the material [makes] the characters emerge. I do sketches, but most of my work just happens through the making process,” explains Morris. 

This might sound like the height of creative noodling – a sort of charming fantasy fabricated for Instagram, divorced from reality – but a glance through Morris’ reel proves her analogue approach is grounded in genuine commercial success. 

I dabbled in all kinds of art-making, but decided I wanted to go into animation because it combined every medium into one.

As well as creating multi-layered animated worlds for big-name brands like Samsung, Hewlett Packard, Burt’s Bees, and Kate Spade, she’s directed music videos for Iron and Wine, and Grammy-winning violinist Hilary Hahn and Oscar-nominated composer Hauschka - not to mention a slew of short films.

Above: Morris created the character Ruby to showcase fashion accessories for Kate Spade. 

With stop motion and puppetry enjoying a renaissance - part of a wider shift back to analogue creativity and a riposte to bland AI-generated perfection - it’s no surprise that clients are courting Morris’ homespun aesthetic. 

I loved how [animation] was experimental and didn’t limit you - you can play with textiles, lighting, sound, sculpting, painting, storytelling.

As she points out, the hallmarks of her work - handcrafted details, heartfelt emotion, patience, and inventive storytelling - are in short supply in our digital age, where the soul of a project is all too often smoothed out along with the rough edges. 

Morris was drawn to the medium long before it became a trend, however. Having grown up with the likes of Wallace & Gromit and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, she went on to study at Rhode Island School of Design: “I dabbled in all kinds of art-making, but decided I wanted to go into animation because it combined every medium into one, plus I loved how it was experimental and didn’t limit you - you can play with textiles, lighting, sound, sculpting, painting, storytelling,” she remembers. 

After taking a stop-motion animation class, she “fell in love with creating all these ideas in my head on a miniature scale”. 

Above: Morris's spot for Burt’s Bees reveals the inspiration she garners from the natural world, in particular her woodland home. 

Whether it’s construction paper, repurposed textiles or clay, physical materials have always been at the heart of Morris’ craft, allowing her to visualise often abstract concepts in a meaningful and unexpected way. 

Her mesmerising music video for Explosions in the Sky's The Ecstatics brought a single sentence brief - ‘the wilderness of the mind’ - to life through a combination of cut-out construction paper sculptures, transparent plastics and custom-blown glass increments: endlessly shape-shifting human silhouettes into abstraction. 

Cut-up paper was also Morris’ material of choice for a commercial for cloth nappy brand Charlie Banana, but here it was used to signal the brand’s sustainability credentials. “I sourced a load of recycled paper, including some made out of old jeans [denim fibres] that I’d made myself in a paper-making class,” she explains.

Above: Morris used sustainable materials – including home-made paper – in this campaign for eco nappy brand Charlie Banana.  

Perhaps her most innovative use of materials was the creation of Doris, the titular character from Amazon Prime’s nature documentary, OCTOPUS! Morris’ first port of call? The local haberdashery shop, for yarn, buttons and fabric – a tactic that had worked well on a previous music video, Bounce Bounce, where she recreated a rockpool and its inhabitants from crochet doilies and old hankies. 

“I did a lot of research into the giant reef octopus, the texture of their skin, the way they move, their distinctive colour. The store owner hand-dyed her own chiffon, and I found a single piece in the perfect orangey red, which ended up being the main material,” Morris remembers. 

Above and main image: Morris sourced haberdashery items to create Doris, the star of nature documentary OCTOPUS!.

Each element - from Doris’ eyes, which were made of glass to “capture emotion and reflect the light”, to her rock formation den, crafted from foraged moss, mushrooms and seedpods resembling “perfect little bits of coral” - had to be considered and refined in a month-long process, with the tentacles presenting the main challenge. 

I wanted to capture that spontaneity of a kid's imagination and clay lends itself to being very intuitive and spontaneous.

Replicating the suckers with buttons and shells weighed down the arms too much - but then Morris found a lightweight crepe paper “with a beautiful texture that mimicked a suction cup”, allowing them to move in a lifelike way. Overlaid on an intricate bond socket armature (virtual skeleton) featuring 30 joints in each tentacle, the resulting puppet creates a real emotional connection with the viewer - quite a feat for a slippery cephalopod. 

Above: Creating a crocheted rockpool for the Hilary Hahn and Hauschka video prepared Morris for more marine-themed magic in OCTOPUS!.

Morris is more than simply a materials girl, though: she’s adept at emotional storytelling, tenderly portraying the realities of motherhood in a recent claymation short, Blueberry Girl, for Nouns Fests. Inspired by being her four-year-old daughter’s “jungle gym”, the film imagines Morris as a huge body being climbed on by a tiny figure, who morphs into different characters like a cat, a whale and a heart. 

Her daughter’s adorably squeaky voice narrates the action. “I wanted to capture that spontaneity of a kid's imagination and clay lends itself to being very intuitive and spontaneous,” says Morris. “Also, conceptually, as a mom, you don’t really know what you're doing every day - you go with the flow, there’s no manual.”

Taking us out of watching this stuff on our tiny phone screens and having a large-scale [interactive animation] instead feels like a really exciting new venture.

Projects such as these are a reminder that, despite continuing advances in tech, such as generative AI, it can’t yet replicate what Morris calls “the soul and the feeling” in films. However, it has proved useful for streamlining the more time-consuming aspects of stop-motion, such as style frames. “Normally, when I have to come up with an idea in a few days, I make a handmade style frame that I photograph. It takes a lot of time, and it's usually very rushed. Using AI to craft something that's a ‘vision’ of what you're going to do - as opposed to the actual thing - has actually been very helpful.” 

Above: Morris's daughter Rowan appeared in a tender claymation film projected onto a building in Denver as part of the Night Lights festival. 

Despite her homespun aesthetic, the past few years have seen Morris increasingly embracing digital tools, for example to animate handmade elements. “Not everything has to be done in camera,” she muses. “You actually have more freedom [with digital] and you can shift things around - especially for client work where there's constant changes.” Her trusty Multi Plane camera, which allows her to animate several layers of physical elements, certainly earns its keep, though when it comes to stitching all the animated pieces together, she’s happy to hand over to a digital compositor.

For Morris, the next frontier in animation isn’t AI, but interactive animation, such as the immersive experiences on offer at Las Vegas’ Sphere. “Taking us out of watching this stuff on our tiny phone screens and having a large-scale interaction instead feels like a really exciting new venture,” she says, citing Rowan, another claymation film featuring her daughter, which was projected onto a building facade for passersby to interact with as part of Denver’s Night Lights festival. 

Above: The promo for Explosions in the Sky's track, The Ecstatics, was germinated by a single-sentence brief; 'the wilderness of the mind'. (Below) Morris at work. 

Morris’ miniature worlds certainly deserve a bigger and more interactive canvas, but for the time being, she’s focusing her energy on a smaller and more analogue side project: writing a children’s book. “The plan is to make miniature sets [and compose a scene] and photograph it, then recompose the scene and photograph it - similar to a stop-motion film. I know nothing about illustration, or the book world, so it's something I'm excited to learn more about,” she says. 

We wrap up the interview so Morris can prepare for the North Carolina animation festival Dash Bash, where she’s leading a workshop on how to animate on a phone using the Stop-motion Studio app. Is she dreading leaving her woodland idyll? “Living out here in the woods, I sometimes feel I don’t know what’s going on in the world,” she laughs. “So it’s good to get back to civilisation sometimes.”