The Electric Sheepdog

My favourite thing about writing my own stories and animations is the freedom to be wacky.

The wackiness in my most current short film to date, The Electric Sheepdog, comes from two aspects: quirky characters, and the set design.

From having a plastic bottle cap as a soup bowl and using toys (why else do people do stop motion?) for characters, to our strange sets, we literally turned our basement into a full studio, with three different sets sitting around the basement at any one time, and the space between devoted to set construction or film editing. (Great thing to do during school exams.)

Besides the mess we created, I also managed to get back pains by making the brilliant move of putting all my sets on coffee tables half a metre (1’8”) off the ground. And then working hours at a go without stopping. Several times.

Like every animation I’ve done before, this was an experience on a big scale. It’s the first time I used special effects in a film, my first time voice acting, and my first time creating  some of my own sound effects.

And it was my first truly original script that I was really proud of. (Well, I was proud of the other ones too, but much more so for this one. And some of my other stories, like Elkhart Express, were based off true events.)

Well, here it is. I hope you enjoy it.