One such Independent film maker is M dot Strange who, after years of making short live action and stop-motion films, has graduated to a full-length movie called We Are The Strange© which he hopes to unleash on the world in the very near future.
Mr. Strange started making films right out of high school with a borrowed video camera. Filmmaking became his passion and, after graduating college, he kept plugging away at his art, eventually making a living at a combination of shooting commercials, and web design. His personal films started out as small live-action skits. He did those for a few years before getting into animation, starting like a lot of beginner animators with stopmotion claymation. But like many animators, he soon discovered the limitations of clay: things like lighting turning the clay into slag, or stress causing limbs to fall apart in the middle of a scene. So like a lot of animators he started searching around for better ways of doing things. First, by building armatures out of aluminum, then getting into more complex model-based puppetry, and recently graduating into full CG animation using CINEMA 4D®.
Though he had no formal training in filmmaking, Mr. Strange soon found that preparation is key. While he has completed 60 or 70 short films, many of his films ended up unfinished and he realized he could have done a lot more if he had done more preproduction planning. Strange has learned to be meticulous about shot sheets and storyboards, so he always knows where he is on his films. “It just came down to the fact that if you are not prepared, it's not going to happen. There is no way to wing it with filmmaking. I actually enjoy the storyboarding and preproduction stuff now. Its a process: you outline it, then write the script, then storyboard, then do the animatic. Only then can you start filming. Once you do all the preproduction, you have confidence all the way along. There's not much mystery, so you can focus more on the nuances and technicalities because you know all of your story so well. Its all just so essential, particularly with animation, where you don't want to render any animation that you aren't actually going to be using.”
We are the Strange is an interesting combination of stop-motion, 8-bit game-style graphics, and full CG done in CINEMA 4D, all melded into an original look that Mr. Strange has dubbed Str8nime.
