Making a stop-motion film is a massive amount of work. Its not like a live action movie, where you can scout locations, dress them up the way you want them to look then shoot a scene on it, oh no – everything you see in the film needs to be made…from scratch. I’m not just talking about the general locations that need to be made for each scene like buildings, rooms or outdoor areas, I mean everything, from chairs, desks & pens, to lamp posts and shop signs, benches and trees, litter and bricks, cheeseburgers to fruit bowls…and fruit for that matter, everything – it all needs to be made from scratch, to scale. Enter, the Art Department.
Headed by Phil Lewis and Bridget Phelan, and currently running approximately 12 staff members, the Night of the Trampires Art Department is busy creating all the sets & props needed for the film.
Watching all the props rise from piles of raw materials is pretty cool – seeing the sets appear on the floor for their full build tests for the first time is also very cool, but it makes you realise just how big of a task our Art Dept. have on this production. Really, you should see some of the sets…but we’re not going to let that happen, not for a while anyway.
I don’t want to state the obvious, but I’m gonna. Remember, when you watch it, that every little thing you see on screen has been made from scratch by our Art Dept. When you think about it in those terms…it’s fairly mind blowing.