Filmmaker focuses on clay animation, wins acclaim online

ELBERT AULL Staff Writer
Portland Press Herald (Maine)
04-02-2006
Filmmaker focuses on clay animation, wins acclaim online
Byline: ELBERT AULL Staff Writer
Edition: FINAL
Section: FRONT
Memo: sidebar 20

Dan MacKenzie said he woke up around 6 o'clock the morning after he posted one of his short films on a popular Web site where fans comment on others' work.

"It was Christmas-morning-like anticipation," the Gorham High School junior said of the rush to see what others thought of his film.
The budding clay animation filmmaker was pleasantly surprised.

"(Y)ou're like a claymaster or something, wonderful job," reads one of the comments on www.newgrounds.com about his short film, "Become."

"I don't even know how to describe this. Really great things(,) man, really great," wrote another visitor, the day after the film was posted in mid-2005.

"Become" is now on its way to the Canadian Film Festival.

MacKenzie caught the film bug as a child, when he made stop- motion movies with Legos. He is still relatively new to claymation filmmaking.

The tall, lanky 17-year-old spent the past year learning and perfecting the art. He's self-taught, using Internet tutorials and scrutinizing the "how-to" footage on the making of the claymation movie "Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit" and the making of the old "King Kong" film, where moviemakers also used stop-action techniques.

He now runs a one-man production company, Mack Productions, makes short films and updates his Web site, www.mackpro.net, out of a basement room his father once used as a home office.

The Internet gives MacKenzie the opportunity to get near-instant feedback on his short films. Through the Web, he also met an artist from the United Kingdom who agreed to record original music and do the voice-overs for his latest film free of charge.

"The Internet is huge. If I didn't have the Internet, I wouldn't even know where to start," he said.

MacKenzie said life as a claymation producer can be frustrating, especially when a character's arm keeps falling off or just won't move the way he wants. It's also tedious work. MacKenzie, who relies almost entirely on basic editing software, connects a digital video recorder to his computer, moves his clay models a tiny bit, and clicks with his mouse to capture an image. Every 20 clicks equals one second of film.

His latest movie, "Winter Attack," took approximately three months to make. The film, starring a friendly ogre who gets pummeled with snowballs by a renegade snowman, is about five minutes long.

But the creative process behind the stories - making backdrops from Styrofoam packaging, scribbling models of characters on notebook paper - is exciting, he said.

MacKenzie, who is in the process of visiting film schools, said he wants to stick with claymation. He said the success of films like "Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit" and "Corpse Bride" prove that claymation still has a place in an industry that is becoming more and more dominated by computer animation.

His next project is a short commercial for the Portland Center for the Arts' Web site.

Illustrations/Photos:
Caption: Staff photo by Derek Davis Dan MacKenzie, 17, of Gorham
runs a one-man production company, Mack Productions, and makes short
clay animation films in a basement room his father once used as a
home office.

Copyright 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.