Incredible Stop Motion Film Made with Intricate Styrofoam Models and Long-Exposure Light Trickery

If it wasn’t for the very short behind the scenes video we’ve embedded below, we would have a hard time believing that the animation above really was just an incredibly intricate mix of stop-motion and long-exposure lighting effects — it’s beyond impressive.

Called Marilyn Miller, the six-minute video is the brain child of animator and director Mikey Please and Dan Ojari of Parabella Animation Studio, and it took a year for the duo to sculpt, photograph and otherwise create this jaw-dropping styrofoam story.

Here’s that short BTS clip we mentioned:

On the face of it, the film is about creation and destruction; or, as Please puts it in the Vimeo description, “Marilyn maketh, Marilyn taketh awayth.” But once the camera pulls back, we realize that Marilyn is really a meta commentary on the art of stop-motion animation… filmed in stop-motion animation.

And if anybody can appreciate the frustration of trying to create something and constantly falling short of your own sky-high expectations, it’s photographers. Fortunately, most of our work doesn’t involve the “one zillion hand carved tiny things” Please had to deal with.

(via Colossal)