the demons dance
The Demon's Dance was a silent film that I worked on with a few friends in 2024. It was made for The International Youth Silent Film Festival's last year, and it took 2nd place. I directed it, designed and made all of the puppets, drew the storyboards, and animated the entire short. It was a chaotic project, but overall it turned out pretty well, and I'm really happy I was able to make it!
All of the puppets are built off a wire armature, I used a combinatrion of EVA and upholstry foam to bulk out the shapes, and for fine details such as the faces, horns, ect I used Apoxie clay. Apoxie clay is super durable, and you don't need to bake it so it was the best choice for what I was doing, as I could sculpt the characters after they had oven unsafe materials on them. You're also able top get really detailed with Apoxie as opposed to something like foam clay.
for the 3 demons, I covered them in liquid latex to give a skin effect.
I designed a system for the set where I could remove all of the walls easily to get different camera angles. Every "room" in the film is actually the same one. I painted the walls different colors on both sides so they could flip and look like different rooms, I did the same for the floor. Each wall had wooden pegs on the bottom so I could easily move and change them to my liking.
The hallways had a different system; each wall was attached to the floor with hinges so they could be lowered and raised. The celing was just a piece of cardboard I sprayed with a drywall texture, and I used a strand of lights I got from michaels as the celing lights.
This did cause a few issues however: there was a slight flicker to the lights which meant some frames were more exposed than others. This issue was made worse by my use of the Stop Motion app I shot the film on, which also had issues with inconsistantly lighting each frame. Big thank you to my editor Nicolas for evening out the lighting in Premire Pro.