Tales from the Crypt, a short history.

Well I've finally done it. I've broken down and created a blog for the world to see. Or perhaps it's more of a plog as I will be logging the production of my current stop motion film, “The Vampire from Beyond the Crypt”. If you have never read my makeshift blog over at the www.animateclay.com forums then I advise you visit here to get caught up on the whole of my activities. But if you do not have the time I will do my best to give a brief overview for the start to my present situation.

It all started around Christmas time last year, on the 14 of December. Brian, Hugh, and I had finished our stop motion monstrosity “Attack of the LEGOs: Revenge of the Order of Darkness”. About a year before that, on December of 2003 my good friend and writer Robert had come up with an idea for a movie that we very much wanted to make, but did not dare trust ourselves with the project. But upon finishing the LEGO stop motion with my other friends the idea occurred to me that we could do Robert’s idea with clay. I did not realize how bad I was at stop motion at the time but the idea of a stop motion movie seemed much safer then making a live action, just because I had done it before, finished the project and knew the ropes.

So it was decided that I would do a test and make a short clay-mation film. If this project turned out to be crap I would abandon stop motion and pursue a career in computer programming or something all together less stupid then stop motion. However Trinket was quite the success, people who owned stores told us (Robert and I) how much they hated the woman, we won third place in a small film festival, which I think was a feat in itself as Trinket had almost no plot, and we ranked #1 in the FXHome cinema for about 20 days. After finishing we began to look into making our dream project, which we planned to be somewhere between 20 and 30 minuets. However I did not want to jump into a project of that size just after a test that only had a 1 minuet and 25 seconds of animation. That was a rather big leap. I was kicking around the idea of a short vampire film at the time. I really wanted to push my lighting and I felt that a film with a vampire setting could give lots of room for experimentation. So I made the very first concept bust of the vampire who would become the villain of our little tale.

As you can see it is far closer to Bela Lugosi then to today’s chicks with pointy teeth in tight leather. We feel that vampires have a very dignified yet comic air surrounding them and could never take a film about them seriously.