Build That Wall Film

It has been over six months time since I've written a post and much has happened this year. Probably the most significant has been my transition into stop-motion animation, which is a huge learning curve, even for an experienced puppeteer.

I have been dabbling in film for quite a few years now, but even that didn't prepare me for the journey upon which I now embark. Although completely fascinating, it's daily learning new techniques, especially in the dramatic film genre and here I believe I need to acknowledge my cinematographic guru, Sidat de Silva, who's been patiently guiding me through the learning process, even though he's based in Sydney and I'm in Melbourne.

'Build That Wall' is my second short-animation film (the first was "Je Suis Punch!" featured below) and it took our group four months to complete, what turned out to be a four-minute film. That's a minute a month. Why so long? I believe the answer lies in the fact that when you are shooting stop-motion, you are working with twenty-four frames a second and this is a huge amount of still images that get put together to make your film.

Even though my animation software only shoots twelve frames per second, which we double-up to make twenty-four, it's still huge. This means on a good day, you can never really shoot more than fifteen seconds and that's a lot of shooting in an eight to ten hour day.

So my team and I began the production with a rough concept of researching "walls, barriers, borders and boundaries" a subject which has been fascinating me over the past year or two. And then came the shocking 'Trump phenomenon' and his talk about 'building a wall' which has every intelligent 'thinking' person is a state of complete shock, as to how any human being could possibly support such total incompetence and lack-of-caring for his fellow beings. I guess some people supported 'Hitler' in 1933?

As much as we tried to get media coverage in Australia, the media rejected our calls, but the Hillary campaign really liked the film and 'Humanity for Hillary' are launching it on their channels on Friday 28 October at 5pm (New York time).

So in short, the result is a four-minute film (above) and a 'Build That Wall' website, where you can view 'Behind the Scenes' and 'The Trailer' by clicking here.