Dried Up from Cecil on Vimeo.

Jeremy Casper, Stuart Bury, and Isaiah Powers co-wrote and directed “Dried Up”, a six minute stop motion animation shot with Dragon Stop Motion. Recently, they were awarded the Silver Student Academy Award in the Animation category. The award was presented by Henry Selick.

“Dried Up” is the story of a quiet old man who, surrounded by desolation and apathy, perseveres to remain true to the nature of his own beliefs and character. He toils daily to forge a last ditch effort to bring hope and life to a faithless, drought ridden old town.

As students of animation at Kansas City Art Institute, they were early adopters of Dragon Stop Motion software, and they are some of its biggest fans.

We asked Isaiah Powers about using our software for this film:

“I think first I would simply like to say, thank you. We used Dragon Stop Motion to shoot every frame of our film and the longer we used it the more excited we got about it. Any time we got to a point where we needed a specific feature it was already there. I have never used a bit of software that was so intuitive and allowed us to get straight to work so fast. In the stressful environment of stop-motion production it was a relief. At one point we were ready to start animating Cecil playing his organ and we thought, we need an x-sheet so we can sync his motions to the music… you know I bet there is one programmed in here, so far it has had everything else we wanted. Within a few clicks we found the Dragon X-Sheet and were busy loading music in and setting up the shot.

“Another thing I found especially helpful was the ability to easily switch between the high res photo taken and the preview photos. Our sets were highly detailed and made it possible to keep up with everything. It also helped realign the camera if I accidentally bumped the set in an impromptue dance.

“We had basically no budget for our film. I made a hand cranked camera dolly for about $30. We used clamp lights and waxed paper for diffusion. The most expensive thing we used was hot glue. We scavenged for cardboard and built our sets with found objects. The main character in our film, Cecil builds his creations out of junk he finds around town so we figured if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for us. Dragon is a pro application priced for everyone, and I tell that to anybody who asks me about shooting stopmotion, you gotta use it! “

Here is what Jeremy Casper had to say about our software:

“Dragon is affordable for both the professional and student. We basically created our film with very little to no money, so being able to buy such an amazing program made the experience tangible. I could go on and on about Dragon, but seriously who has that kind of time on their hands. To anyone who asks me, Dragon is the only program for this kind of medium, period.”

“Dried Up” continues its way through the animation film festival circuit. Next up is the Melbourne International Animation Festival.

Jeremy Casper’s Blog
http://cazpear.wordpress.com
Isaiah Powers’s Site
http://isaiahpowers.com
Stuart Bury’s Blog
http://stuartbury.blogspot.com
Dried Up Blog
http://driedup.wordpress.com