Stop Motion animation was every bit as time consuming as I expected, BUT it was also very enjoyable and ridiculously cute. First Nicole and I took a trip to Blink for our costumes and production design. We wanted the set to have texture and make the world conform to a particular color palette. This was easy to do at an art store. If anything, we had to control ourselves before we spent a ton of money on the set! And we wanted to do all of the prep the day before the shoot. We not only built the set, but we drew all the eyes, cut out the eyebrows, made the banner sign – basically everything we could possibly do before the shoot day.

Then the next day we brought in our fruit. We feared it might go bad so the character design did not happen until the shoot day. But the work we did the day before was well worth it! Once we added her eyes and costume, Piper the Pepper came to life!

Shooting went pretty well, but when we switched our lead from a banana to a pepper – due to technical difficulties making a banana stand, the climax and ending needed to be re-written on set. That is not something one should ever spring on the cast, but our fruit was quite accommodating. We finished shooting in a day and put together a rough assembly to make sure it worked. The shots flowed well. There were things to be added in post, but we went home knowing the production part at least was a success!

The color palette and style of the film made the music and sound effect choices easy. We spent the day Sunday punching it up with sound effects, building beats and camera effects and adding in a bit more movement and close ups I knew were easier to do on post than on set. And here is the final film:

The Spin from Jamie Ruddy on Vimeo.