Artist Statement

My animation shows the hidden battle between people's everyday lives and their inner demons. In my work I follow the main character Sam who gains the ability to see peoples inner demons as an exterior form silently controlling the person they belong to. Sam spends the majority of my animation observing the different demons he encounters as even though they are seen as a bad thing he is envious that he doesn't have one, or does he...

My work strives to show the viewer that everyone has there demons even though they may hide them well and that we shouldn't let them control us.

I chose to focus on inner demons as I have had to battle my own demons throughout university and because of this I felt as a final project this would portray my time at university best. Each of the demons in my narrative are based off one of the seven deadly sins greed, sloth and envy as I feel I can best relate to them.

I decided to use stop motion to animate my film as this has always been my favourite type of animation and I have been wanting to create my own short film in this media throughout been at university. I also felt the roughness of stop motion suited this idea best as I have been focusing on peoples imperfections.

For the demons I didn't want to use the traditional representations of the seven deadly sins and decided to create my own style of demons, for this I researched what colours best suited each demon and developed the appearance of each demon through my own judgement of the sin it is based on.

I created all the demons out of plasticine (apart from Envy what is made by coating plasticine in silicone to make him more durable) and all the humans from Sculpey to show the difference between reality and what Sam can see. The clothes for the characters. The set has been made with MDF board then decorated with paint, Sculpey and card, I chose to use quite bright colours for my set to give it a stylized effect.

When filming I decided the lighting would get darker as the film progresses to show the shift in Sam's mood. To animate Sam I used a Rig which allowed me to balance him easier but also meant I had to mask it out in post production.