Megan’s top 3 stop-motion shorts
by Megan Landry
As the foundation of film itself, stop-motion is one of the oldest forms of animation around and the procedure to create it is pretty laborious.
If you’re not familiar: stop-motion animation involves shooting a sequence of photographs as the subject(s) on screen are moved in slow and subtle increments per each photo that is taken. When the photos are played back very quickly, “frame-by-frame”, one after another, the result conveys an illusion of motion.
We’ve all seen the major blockbuster claymation classics like Wallace & Grommet, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Coraline. But in this blog, I wanted to shed some spotlight on three of my top favourite stop-motion short shorts with smaller crews and smaller budgets.
Maneuvers (Manöver) (2021)
by Sami Ortlieb (Level 1)
Using snow as a sculpting medium, “Maneuvers (Manöver)” has got to be the most uniquely raw stop-motion production I have ever seen.
The video features various ski ramps made of snow and logs, constructing and collapsing themselves intermittently while a team of freestyle skiers from Level 1 perform Olympic-grade stunts.
In partnership with Level 1 — a Denver-based video production company focused on freestyle skiing and documentary filmmaking — the project was led by Switzerland-born artist, filmmaker, musician, and professional skier Sami Ortlieb.
Considering time-sensitive factors like weather and shifting daylight as the large-scale snow obstacles were built and photographed in step-by-step succession, each scene in this production would have been very tedious to pull off. Not to mention the time it would take for each skier to land their tricks before the sun changed positions. As any seasoned athlete knows — pulling off big jumps like these takes time, patience, practice, and pain.
Pairing this level of athletic talent with cutting-edge stop-motion innovation is what makes this experimental film so impressive and special.
The behind-the-scenes video reveals a glimpse of Sami’s long-term creative process spanning months of scouting locations, sketching ideas, shovelling snow, and recording the original music score with Swiss band Hazer Baba.
Western Spaghetti (2008)
by Adam Pesapane (PES)
Veteran director, animator, and stop-motion mogul Adam Pesapane, widely known as PES, is a legendary icon in YouTube history.
He started gaining popularity when the website was only a couple of years old, and his channel really kicked off when “Western Spaghetti” went viral online.
The video depicts PES while he makes spaghetti, except the ingredients are household objects and craft supplies like yarn, rubber bands, googley eyes, sparkles, and dice.
I remember watching Western Spaghetti for the first time when I was 12 years old. It absolutely captivated me: the charming props, charismatic colours, and whimsical music teamed up with satisfying kitchen sound effects. Re-watching it as an adult gives me nostalgia.
Dubbed as the internet’s “first viral stop-motion cooking video” it wields over 300 million views today — PES’s second most viewed video behind his Oscar-nominated sequel, Fresh Guacamole. Since then, he’s produced award-winning commercials for big-league brands like Corona, Honda, and Android.
This sensational era of old-school YouTube shaped the formative years of my own career in filmmaking. I can thank the pioneer-creators like PES for that. His distinct style boasts an effortless look-and-feel that is continuous throughout all of his work.
In A Nutshell (2017)
by Fabio Friedli (YK Animation)
You could watch “In A Nutshell” (2017) fifty times over and still catch something new every time.
This intricate masterpiece carefully layers nuance, polarization, and grandiose global themes in a tasteful combination of stop-motion techniques and other animation styles.
From war and world hunger to religion and technology, the video summarizes human existence in a rapid parade of ordinary objects that are meant to represent bigger conversations.
In collaboration with German animation studio YK Animation, Switzerland-based film director Fabio Friedli was hired to produce a trailer for the International Film Festival of Winterthur when he caught inspiration to grow the film in a new direction, mid-production.
There are hundreds of props and materials across the 3,000+ photographs in the final film. The sheer amount of thought, labour, and legwork involved in pulling these visuals together is incredible.
Absent of music, the eye candy is synced with an array of colourful sounds and foley composed by Fabio himself (who also produces his own music under his artist name, Pablo Nouvelle).
What I love the most about this project is how creative and versatile every moment is. Every second offers a new world of interpretation, and that’s how Fabio intended it to be: ambiguous and open-ended.
