The Digital Wizards Studios founder originally chose sculpting because he couldn’t draw; 2 decades later, the veteran of LEGO stopmo projects for ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Happy Potter,’ ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Star Wars’ has 2 completely different but equally rewarding films on the festival circuit.
Digital Wizards Studios founder Paul Hollingsworth says he’s always been better at sculpting than drawing.He caught the stop-motion bug while attending Ontario’s Confederation College, after he made a Claymation film called .
“I took about 1/12th of my student loans and bought about 1,000 pounds of clay,” Hollingsworth recalls.“A friend of mine at the time and I built this massive, colorful forest.I had actually spent so much time on the production design that I didn't spend as much time on the puppets, but I was also obsessed with making 25 background characters for a large scene.
I wish I’d had a little bit of guidance, but that's how I got started in sculpting.I felt like I could do something more epic with clay than I could do with just humans and a camera.” And now he’s getting the chance to prove it.After almost two decades of creating LEGO stop-motion animations for properties like and , Hollingsworth is getting back to his sculpting roots with .
The film follows missing classmates, mysterious footprints, and strange sounds that all point to one thing: proof that monsters thrive in the forests of Nowheresville! Jasmine Bonkers, a middle school misfit, sets out to save her town with the help of her friend Owen, honing her scientific prowess to create one-of-a-kind monster-hunting devices.The film was screened at Mobile Animation Festival this past week.Upcoming screening dates will be announced on Digital Wizards social media (@digitalwizardsstudios).
Check out the trailer: “I’d been thinking about making for a while,” says Hollingsworth, who wrote and directed the short.“I have always had these obsessions with monsters and with monster movies, and I really wanted to make my own.Because of clients like Warner Bros., Disney and Google, we've been able to get some of the most amazing artists in LA that can work on the art, puppets, VFX, and cinematography.” The crew includes director of photography Gavin Brown from and ; storyboard artist, animator and VFX artist Sean Willets from ; gaffer Dwight Campbell from ; storyboard artist, 2D animator and VFX artist Karissa Zeron from ; along with’ Vinny Cretara, who serves as puppeteer, editor and artist alongside art designer, storyboard artist and 2D animator Shane Murray.
“We were able to build a really efficient pipeline within our studio when we’d usually have downtime in between projects, especially around Christmas time,” says Hollingsworth.“So, instead of laying everybody off around Christmas time, I kept everybody's contracts going for about four to six weeks and was like, ‘Let's see what this team of 12-15 people can make in that four-to-six-week period.’” Most of the wire armature puppets had already been made by studio members over the previous two years in between other projects.“When somebody's like, ‘Oh, do you want to do ball and socket?’ I feel like they just showed up in a Mercedes-Benz, or a Rolls-Royce,” Hollingsworth jokes.
While started out with clay puppets, they were then turned into 3DCG designs and 3D printed for the film; the sets’ forest trees are all hand-made as well by art director Jeff Cross, who put plaster and paint over cardboard rolls and then fashioned a cardboard comb to graze over the materials to add texture.Clay, Hollingsworth’s first stop-motion medium of choice, is still used for some final cut aspects of production, such as for character eyebrows.“They are held on with a little bit of sticky wax,” explains Hollingsworth.
“The eyelids are clay as well.The big reason we didn’t use fully clay models was because we wanted to have the replacement mouth, as opposed to just the sticker mouth.It did mean that we had to do a lot of cleanup in post, but I think the design was pretty sensational.
It adds a lot of production value.” He continues, “I used to hate getting fingerprints on my Claymations in college, but then I learned that was part of the charm.So, we wanted this film to feel as organic as possible where we could manage it on our time and budget.” The crew also spent a good amount of time on the practical effects, often derived from character Jasmine’s scientific inventions.Augustus Danko () served as VFX Supervisor and worked with DP Brown on many of the shots.
“There were so many things that Gavin was able to do with putting lights and fireworks and even grain-of-rice-sized wired lights into the scenes to really make these worlds feel real,” says Hollingsworth.“We'll do separate lighting passes, and when we send those lighting passes to effects, we're able to layer them all over each other and build something beautiful.All our work is also done in-house.
Nothing is contracted out, so it’s easy for the VFX supervisor to talk to the DP.We’re all in a room together and can then talk about lighting passes and compositing and experiment with our ideas right there.From laboratory experiments to rocket-powered skateboards and Minotaur transformations, there were a lot of sparks flying on set.
And it’s all practical effects, “complimented” as Hollingsworth puts it, with a little bit of VFX.“With the Minotaur scene in particular, we took a two-liter bottle of soda, covered it in little snippets of lighting gels, lit that, and spun that around so it provided this disco ball lighting effect,” explains Hollingsworth.“And then we shot the Minotaur on a separate pass and had that same lighting affect the Minotaur.” In addition to the Mobile Animation Festival, also played on the IMAX screen at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the ultimate test for any stop-motion artist.
“The VFX supervisor from Shadow Machine was there and he was like, ‘Wow, your VFX is so clean,’” shares Hollingsworth.“That was amazing to me.We were just fortunate enough to have such an amazing, tightly knit team that has gotten to create beautiful projects together many times before.” Another, very different stop-motion project Hollingsworth is directing with Digital Wizards is .
The film, pitched to Hollingsworth by ’s Ben Varadi, takes place at the height of the Second World War, where two young soldiers on different sides of history begin to question the war they once glorified, and are forced to choose how to respond.It’s very dissimilar to the fun, spooky comedic adventure of Weirdos.But, once again, everything is hand-crafted with 3D-printed characters.
The film screens at the Yucca Valley Film Festival on Saturday, November 8.Check out the trailer: “Ben’s grandmother had survived Auschwitz, but over a dozen members of his family had been killed by Nazis,” shares Hollingsworth.“He wrote a song about it and came to me wanting to do a music video.
I was like, ‘Man, I think we should do a whole film.’ And it turned out gorgeous.So, currently, we have these two films that are totally different on the festival circuit, and it’s been an incredible experience, because you go to one theater screening and everybody's crying, and they're touched and then you go to another screening where they’re laughing and screaming.It’s wild how we can be so emotionally moved by plastic.” is dedicated to all those who fight for our freedom.
is dedicated to lovers of B-monster movies and spooky season adventures.Both are made for lovers of stop-motion.“The fact that I get paid to make things for , , and , is incredible and I love working with those brands, but it really helped pave the way for us to do what we could do on our own,” says Hollingsworth.
“There are benefits to having a large studio, but our small team of friends really push each other, take risks that sound like fun and collaborate like friends working on a science project.We care about what we do and we care about each other.It’s a good combination.” Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime.
She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment.Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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