Any aspiring acrobat hoping to be the first to walk the entire length of a staircase at Camp Randall on their hands is way too late. This feat was already tackled in 1981 by Mark Daniel, who walked from the top to the bottom of the east side of the old grungy version of the football stadium. It was captured for posterity Joel Fletcher in The Wanderer, a short film that also includes handwalking feats at the state Capitol, on the UW campus and Library Mall, all the way up to the edge of a cliff. "Surrealism and athleticism combine in the upside-down world of a unique individual," explains Fletcher.
This short feat on film follows below.
Joel Fletcher is an artist and animator who produced some of his early films in Madison during the early 80s. Since then, he has worked for TV and film productions on "stop-motion and computer animation, time lapse, anaglyph 3D stereo, visionary painting, landscape photography, model making, life drawing, puppet sculpture, and visual effect," with many examples available on joelfletcher.com.
The soundtrack to the short consists of two very-well known pieces of classic composition. The second is the unmistakable main theme to Richard Wagner's Die WalkÃre. While the first may sound like Hans Zimmer's score to Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator, it is actually a piece of "Mars, the Bringer of War" from Gustav Holst's 1916 orchestral suite titled The Planets , an issue that actually led the Holst Foundation to file a lawsuit earlier this year.
Also recently featured here was People Patterns -- a stop-motion photography film created by Fletcher that features Madison pedestrian life circa 1982.
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