Stop-motion animation comes to big screen

The five-minute film uses origami art-based characters to show the importance of preserving wildlife.

LAHORE:

Stop-motion animation has been brought to the big screen by Moaz Mobeen, a freelance artist who says lack of equipment poses a challenge to upcoming artists in the field.

Mobeen’s stop-motion animation Killing the Cycle was shown at the festival in the above-18 Pakistani films open category.

The five-minute stop-motion animation film uses origami art-based characters to portray the importance of conserving the environment and preserving wildlife.

Mobeen, who is pursuing a postgraduate degree in film and television at the Institute of Communication Studies at the Punjab University, said he has been working on stop-motion animation projects for several years.

He said he had previously produced two films which competed at film festivals at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and the King Edward Medical College.

He said there was no work for stop-motion artists in the local industry.

“I have always been attracted to origami,” he says.

“My greatest limitation was that I didn’t have the right equipment,” he says.

He says stop-motion animation requires an intensive routine of capturing images and then rendering them in a sequence to give a continuous motion effect.

He says the technique can be very cumbersome.

“Festivals like these help young artists gain confidence and a better skill set,” he says.

Mobeen says he is working on another stop-motion animation which he expects to enter in the next film festival at LUMS.



Published in The Express Tribune, September 21^st, 2013.