“Pumpkin boy” was my contribution to the fifth Stop-mo-Jam hosted by Anthony Scott, the themes were Christmas and Halloween in celebration of the 30 year anniversary of stopmotion cult classic “Nightmare before Christmas”.
For my version I wanted to develop an older design of mine into an actual puppet and chose this ghostly pumpkin boy, cause i felt like he was already a very expressive base to work on.
For the shorts there was a limit of 20 seconds, so I had to think up something that would be able to translate and be really conscious of not going over runtime. The mood I was aiming for was spooky, but still somewhat lighthearted and playful. Replacement animation was used to transform a worm into a sugar cane, to give some magic and whimsy to the scene.
This was a great chance to dabble with fabrication techniques I wasn’t yet super familiar with, I made replacement faces for the first time, using a silicone mold and polymer clay for the faces, 8 in total. It worked out really well and gave this character the much needed expressiveness, as i shot just with him, a dark background and a couple of props.
