I’ve been working on an insanely difficult project in my real job. It’s a huge undertaking that I’ve made even more difficult by adding in stop motion elements. I LOOOOOVE stop motion. To me it’s one of the really magical things of cinema. I love the problem solving, the designing, the building with real materials, the focus on details and the absolute tediousness of the work. One mistake and you’re starting that whooooole scene all over again. Period.

It makes me hold my breath, crawl around on the floor, lift heavy objects, get glue and paint on all of my clothes, sweat under lights for hours—for a few seconds of footage. But to see something that I made, come to life is incredible. I love it.

Having said all of that, I need to save it for my own projects because it’s incredibly time consuming. No one in their right mind can really fully grasp the time it takes unless they too are insane enough to do it!!!

Our very 1st film project was a silly little stop motion in 2005-ish. Mariela and I are a team with stop motion. Together we can do anything. A couple that has been together for 17+ years, that can bicker about the dumbest things, are calm and collected for 4 hours animating a 10 second sequence together. It’s like our zen place. Each piece moved in rhythm, we sweat, we barely breathed and we finished. No bickering. No arguing. It was pretty beautiful. We should do it more often…