How to Impress Slamdance With Your Claymation Short
Stop motion animator James Smith tells us how he crafted his charming Slamdance short "Demons in the Closet"
"Demons in My Closet"
"Demons in the Closet" is a very short, very good animated film by German animator James Smith, who uses economy of storytelling in a masterful way. The film clocks in at just over two minutes, yet somehow still tells a very relatable and endearing story of overcoming loneliness (i.e. one of said demons in the closet).
Made in just two months in his room, "Demons in the Closet" a wonderful example of a DIY filmmaking passion project. James set out to make a short, did it, and made it into Slamdance.
Read below on how he pulled off the impressive feat.
The following Quotes from James Smith are edited for clarity.
"It took me about two months. I worked, too, and it was difficult to arrange with my working schedule and animating it all. Yeah, but the whole animation took me two weeks. I worked on it for 10 to 15 hours straight sometimes.
"Also building and modeling the clay characters [can be challenging], because the clay characters can break easily, so you have to be smart and very fast to animate them. So that's also quite a challenge.
"And then it took me four weeks to edit it all together, do all the sound effects. I did all the voices by myself too. So all the demonic voices, all the effects on it. And yeah, voicing the characters that, I don't know if you know, but I think you might notice that it's my voice on the characters."
What Are the Technical Assets used for Claymation?
"I'm using a cheap Nikon DSLR, the cheapest one. And I'm using the software called Dragonframe, the stop motion software, where you shoot each frame— I use 12 to 15 FPS. And always, sometimes I'm switching to whatever fits right in the moment. And yeah, mostly use 12 FPS. But yeah, I'm using stop-motion frame capturing software to animate it. I've been using this for years now, it's so fantastic.
"When I was very young, there was iStopMotion and MonkeyJam, and there are so many of these stop-motion software, so I tried them all over the years. But that one is I think the most professional one I've been using so far.
"I started when I was 11 or 10 years old. I'm now 27, so yeah, [I've been animating] for 15, 16 years."
Catch a screening of "Demons in the Closet" 4:45 PM MST Thursday at the Slamdance.
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