One hundred and thirty days of work, twelve frames a day at the worst of it
Stop motion shot on a Canon 5D with a home-built orbiting arm, every frame printed and rescanned as a poor-man's film-out because there was no budget for colour timing.
James Siewert's video for Just Desserts, the band of filmmaker Larry Fessenden, is the clearest illustration on this site of what animation labour actually costs.
Fire sequence RED Komodo
Total work roughly 130 days
Slowest section about 12 frames a day
Grade none — every frame printed and rescanned instead
Twelve frames a day. At twenty-four frames per second that is half a second of screen time for a day of work.
The printing-and-rescanning step is the interesting economy: with no money for colour timing, running each frame out to paper and scanning it back introduced a consistent physical character across the whole piece. Siewert describes it as a kind of poor-man's film-out, and it is a genuinely clever substitution of labour for budget.
The accident that stayed in
The fire sequence tripped the breaker and killed the motor driving the platform, so the platform was pushed by hand instead. That take is the one in the finished video.
Watch it
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