It's no secret that here on NFS we spend a lot of our time looking forward towards new technologies coming down the track which will enable us to achieve more as filmmakers, but older technologies and formats that used to be woven into the fabric of our everday lives only occasionally make it to our pages. London animation studio M-I-E delve back to the medium that made the walkman king and get very hands on with tape in their stop motion / 3D short Jammed:

The team opted for a friendly Viewmaster headed robot as the hero of the piece in a call back to the by-gone era of retro devices. Special care was taken to balance the shiny look of the unspooled tape which forms the film's animal and plant life, with the hard, plastic contours of the retro objects, whilst also aiming for a comforting, warm, magic hour feel. About the process of handing and animating the fragile tape media M-I-E says:

This film was made with a mixture of stop motion and 3D techniques. Cassette tape spool is very fragile and therefore difficult to handle. We created our own specific rig to manage it, making things much easier. Even the little mistakes we made, ended up adding to the film. The robot, the tape and the clouds were all made in Cinema 4D.

You can see that rig in action in this time lapse process video:

So, what do you think of the film, does it get you all misty eyed for linear media and 3D slide card action?

Link: M-I-E

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