Hey film lovers! One of the best things about being an independent filmmaker is being able to do the things you want.
Sometimes that means trying out some wacky project you’ve always wanted to try, but never really had a good reason. Well, trying it out is a good enough reason for indie film. Check out this experiment, featuring Jamie Campos and Andrew Wade!
So this time out, I wanted to try doing stop motion with human beings instead of our usual collection of toys. People offer a number of unique advantages, such as plenty of moving parts, expressive faces, and the ability to move without you moving them. However, they’re quite chaotic in movement sometimes, and can’t sustain poses indefinitely, and can’t be kept in a small container between shoots with no food or water.
Part of doing this was to figure out how we’d do it. I’m not sure we did things right. The actors moved slowly, while I clicked our camera’s trigger as fast as I could. It captured really cool movement, but it wasn’t so controlled. Tons of potential, though.
Using liminal spaces (ie. threshold spaces – places of transition) was partly a function of having a lot of weird spaces around us that have lighting that’s not appropriate for most filming. Those spaces are almost liminal by default, as the normal visual conventions of film make you assume they’re transitional.
Knowing that we’d have weird movement and strange lighting led me to choose a post-apocalyptic scavenger feel for the characters. I felt we could tell a short story about an exchange without needing to film much.
What do you think? Cool little film or a weird experiment to try once and never try again?
Thanks for watching!
