We thought that since the first Commandment short has been getting a lot of play, we’d take a moment to talk a little bit about the process we went through while making the short and show you guys a few production stills as well. This is like the extra features or Bonus Disc of the first short without all of the mess of a DVD… because DVDs are super messy.
Anyways, the concept for this series came from a few ideas we’d had about doing some sort of religious/vegetable and fruit stop-motion animation. In the past we’d begun work on the stations of the cross using potatoes but it didn’t feel like this was hitting the mark as well as some of the other possibilities we came up with. We ended up choosing the 10 commandments for a number of reasons. First of all, most of them are fairly easy to illustrate without the need for dialogue. Second, those that aren’t as easy to communicate without words, require us to use our creative thinking to express human emotion in inanimate objects which is always a gas to work out. Third, we can make the films fairly quickly and have the length of each one be around a minute long, which is perfect because we’re all used to working within 15/30/60 second time frames having worked in the advertising industry. But the most important reason for doing these films is because we thought it’d be funny. We’re not being blasphemous, just ridiculous. We enjoy nonsense.
However, we also decided that it’d be a good idea to do this series of 10 so that we could challenge ourselves and get better at stop-motion animation. We’re fairly confident in our skills now but we thought it’d be nice to challenge ourselves a little bit more each time we made a film. We wanted to up the ante if you will. We originally wanted to make a bunch of films we could write, shoot and edit within a week. So far we’ve been on the mark and i think that with the list of ideas we have (save for maybe one or two) this goal is achievable.
The first film took us 4 days to make. 3 days of testing and one final day of shooting. The set was pretty bare bones as you can tell from the video so most of the work went into the subtle nuances of the different characters and fluidity of movement of the objects as well. We did it as a one-shot as well. That means that, in order to keep up the continuity from frame to frame, we couldn’t screw up. Anytime we screwed up, we started over again. On the 4th day, we nailed it.
Take a look at some of the production stills (click to enlarge):
We also worked out a lot of bugs in the process of shooting this first film which should help to make the rest of the films stronger. I think that as the other films are released, you’ll start to see an increase in quality across the board, simply because we aren’t letting the idea go stale. As soon as we finish one film we’re working on the next one, and so on, until all of the films are finished.
I know a few of you are probably thinking, “what are they going to do next?” and, “is Justin single cuz he’s a total beefcake!” Well, i can’t answer those questions right now without giving too much away, but i will show you a sneak peek at the pre-production process that we are trying to wrap today so that we can shoot the second film this weekend:
ooohhh! supplies and cut out paper! what are they doing?
STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT KIDDIES!
-justin