Stop go treatment

Death of the Dinosaurs is a 15 second short made for the 2006 Raindance Nokia shorts competition. Writer, Director and Crew came together through filmmaking collaborative group OTTfilms. The initial idea was to use toy dinosaurs, which would remain quite static, and then add movement in the camera shots to make the whole come to life. It was decided however to go for stop motion as opposed to camera movements when some very expressive faced and moveable toy dinosaurs were found. The resulting Raindance Nokia 15 Second Film finalist is very funny debut for its director Leilani Holmes, who has been talking to James MacGregor. Death of the Dinosaurs has now been selected for the British Independent Film Awards

Elephant's Dream, an 11 minute animation which premiered on the Internet earlier this month, describes itself as an 'open movie'. It was animated on the open source (ie user-built, free and modifiable) 3D package Blender, has been distributed, with the soundtrack, under a Creative Commons (ie free to copy and distribute) license - and almost all the tools used in its creation were open source. Furthermore it provided an early outing for an EU backed project spanning 6 countries - the open source UniVerse - which allows 3D animators in different countries to connect their computers and 3D software to collaborate more closely. The film is an allegorical of a hopeful boy and embittered man travelling through the internal workings of nightmarish machine that responds to their every move, that could be seen as a tantalising showcase of the sort of work that can be created with little more than patience, a computer and web access.

"Everybody is looking in the gutter today. Things we threw out in the 50s and 60s, and the great Golden Age of Hollywood, as bad taste, things people wouldn’t go for, all of a sudden are the norm today. You know, I just read an article in this morning’s paper that said a lot of people are going to see a particular film now just because it’s nasty. Now why do we want to go and see nasty things? At one time I wanted to do Dante’s Inferno, because Gustav Dore’s illustrations were fascinating to me. He was one of my mentor’s, too. But when I started analysing Dante’s Inferno, I said, ‘Who’s going to sit through an hour-and-a-half of tormented souls?’ Today, you sit through three hours of the most ghastly tormented souls. So I was obviously wrong.”

Since I made Grand Day Out, I’ve thought how similar Wallace is to my father, because my father used to make things a lot. He wasn’t an inventor but he was always in the shed making things. In Grand Day Out, Wallace builds a rocket and it’s got wallpaper inside and furniture, and it just reminded me after making the film of my dad. There was seven of us in the family and he made this caravan with a trailer and he put furniture inside and wallpaper and stuff, just like Wallace would, and it just struck me how uncanny it is that he is doing things so similar to the way Wallace does it.