Please enjoy our 4,5 minute holiday short film LITTERBUG! A stop motion/live action hybrid animation created from litter to usher in the 2020s.
We hope to create a Making Of to explain more about the project and its intention. Suffice to say that a world economy that’s more cradle to cradle in its product design and recycling is indispensable — pun intended. Here’s a tiny making of.
It’s a short story about a little litter constructed robot who has an adventure while out collecting other litter.
His name? — E.D. Short for Energy Drink, which it says on his back.
The film had a public viewing at the IFA (International Film Festival in Assen) in 2022 among the section Noordsterren.
It was featured at Plandelman‘s Plandeldagen. Plandelen is a combination of Plastic and Walking in Dutch (Plastic + Wandelen), sort of like Plogging but slower 😉
We had a neighbourhood viewing in our local park before the big movies were shown during a summer movie evening.
There has been interest from abroad to show it at Recycle Week but after permission for showing it I’m not sure if that actually happened.
Let us know if you use it at showings. It’s freely available via youtube but it’s great to hear it spreading and doing what it was made for: inspiring people to make the world a little bit prettier.
The litter collection vlogs below also have some animation in them. The short itself was the most time consuming, but the others also took quite some time. Please like and share so we can actually inspire some people to help make our world a little bit cleaner. Here’s a link to the Youtube playlist.
There are 3 funny and sometimes educational preproduction videos and the playlist ends with the animation itself.
We hope you enjoy these videos in which the idea gets explained and we show the preparation phase collecting litter, all in a fun and child accessible way. They are in Dutch, but they have subtitles.
I try to do a short animation each year, preferably something with the family. In the previous year we didn’t get around to it, so somehow my brainwaves conspired to let this production get a bit out of hand.
This litter theme came up last year and if you watch the video’s above our choice to do a litter stop motion animation for Christmas and New Year gets explained. Suffice to say, litter bugs us. It bugs us a lot. And we’re hoping to make the world a little bit cleaner by doing our bit and inspiring people.
We hope to get around to making a short making of of the animation itself. I will add some pictures later.
Production started with collecting litter with the kids. Their part in the animation itself was some ideas and the voices. Saskia and I did the construction and animation.
It was absolutely essential to have good likable characters.
I’m sure you noticed the story has elements of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, WALL·E, and Star Wars’ BB8. I should also mention Johnny 5 from Short Circuit.
For now, please watch, like and share. Lets clean up this dump!
More soon!
Best wishes,
Frank, Saskia, Tom & Zoe
A stray bikelamp got the whole character started. Most of it’s from a really old computer found in the bushes in the playground.
He has lots of bottle caps: four for the wheels and a bottle cap with lid for his neck. Those half spheres on his wheels are from crackling ball fireworks 💥
The on/off switch for his headlight … facelight? … came from a mangled solar panel lampion.
I didn’t use solder holder, it’s all litter, so his arms are from an umbrella ☂ We found three of them and used two in the animation; the third umbrella came rusted from a canal and was too far gone.
Two cans were used for his body. One Heineken and one Energy Drink. You can still read ‘Energy Drink’ his back, hence his name E.D., or Ed.
And that aluminum foil is actually from a single use BBQ 🍗 That came in right handy. I wouldn’t have managed hinges without it for his neck, shoulders and brow 😀
We did allow ourselves to use glue, batteries and lights in the film, so the battery holder inside wasn’t litter, just recycled ♻️ The lamplight still worked, though! And I added wiring from the computer.
It took me a week to figure out 🤯
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Frank Boxman on Twitter and Instagram: @frankboxman
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