- People ask me this, you know, for my day job,
"Isn't what you do tedious?"
As a stop-motion animator,
you're very conscious of time
and of incrementally moving
a three-dimensional object bit by bit by it.
“Mad God” is a stop-motion film
that I've been kind of making for like the last 30 years.
There's nothing stopping me from continuing doing it.
You know, forever.
When I was five years old in 1955,
I saw King Kong on television.
As a stupid kid, I was just enthralled
by Hollywood monsters, and that was really the thing
that kind of kindled my appetite.
Subsequently, over the years, I have worn many hats
in the motion picture racket.
I've been involved with Star Wars, the “RoboCop” series,
Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers, on and on.
One of the things that gives me
a lot of pleasure is, is to make something,
but the day job has certain requirements to it.
Over the years, those requirements have become
a lot more limiting.
The “Mad God” project allowed me to just make
this more pure thing that was kind of a form of therapy
for me as an antidote to my day job.
It's a combination of live-action
and stop-motion miniature sets in layers like a collage.
For lack of a better term, it's a passion project.
And things keep getting deeper and darker and odder.
There are imaginary cities that are built
out of iron ingots.
There's strange jungles that you go through.
There's this huge dystopic, postindustrial nightmare city.
And it just goes on and on and on,
practically anything that I can think of.
Inherit in it, there's a, um, level of surprise
that I think, you know, for me, is a very child-like kind of effect.
I shoot here at my studio in Berkeley.
It's stocked with all kinds of stuff for all kinds
of different electronic projects, woodworking projects,
lights, cameras, so it's a huge toy box.
All of the characters in “Mad God” are built by me.
The process begins with the articulated skeleton,
and that's made by ball-and-socket
or hinge joints that allow you to move
the characters incrementally one frame at a time.
And then I just wrap lengths of polyurethane foam
and build up the general mass.
From there, I will take latex skins,
adhere them with rubber cement, paint the thing,
and then it's ready to shoot.
When you're actually shooting a stop-motion scene,
you project into the character.
And sometimes it can get very complicated.
You are always gauging acceleration and deceleration,
weight and mass, and then that kind of leads to:
But you know what, what would make it better?
For me, this whole process is more of a compulsion.
I really have no say over it.
It's just something that I, I have to do.
You know, I’ve been doing it for so long,
I breathe, I live and breathe in this world.
It's all I think about.
(loud clunking) (hissing)