As my 5-year-old was playing with his Playmobil toys (remember those?), I happened to casually remark that we should make a short stop-motion movie with them. Foolishly, I thought my suggestion would go unnoticed, but boy was I wrong. The whole movie-making idea really piqued Trevor's interest, probably in part due to the fact that his uncle (AKA my younger bro) is an editor at Pixar and we've been over to their Emeryville campus a few times to absorb all the sheer coolness that permeates the place, as well as watch movie screenings.

So, to get started, we assembled some equipment: a tripod, our old Canon S60 digital camera, my wife's MacBook, a whole mess of Playmobil dudes, and lots and lots of natural light. The toughest part was trying to explain the whole nature of stop-motion animation to my little budding Ray Harryhausen. The primary challenge was, of course, that Kindergarten-age children don't have a lot of patience, which is required in bucketloads for this kind of project. But eventually he got it and did really well.

During production, I was awakened at the crack of dawn every morning with "Daddy! Can we work on the movie now?" after which I'd crawl out of bed and explain that we actually need light to shoot by, so there were a couple hours yet to go. After principal photography was finished, we imported all the photos that were to become our animation frames into iPhoto on the MacBook, and then used iMovie to assemble them on in a timeline and add sound effects, credits, and record the dialogue.

Here's the finished product. I probably need to edit out some of the credits at the beginning. It was fun messing around with it at the time, but now it's just a little tedious. The first part was obviously done by an adult, but the whole exciting battle sequence, not to mention the brilliant dialogue and voice acting, was done by my son, although I have a guest appearance as the Guy Who Goes "Aaaaaaaagh".