So as you might know if you follow me on social media or if you’ve seen any of my recent shorts, I’ve been working on a secret project involving green screens and Spence. Well I’m super excited to finally tell you all about it!

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While location scouting in Portland over the summer I got a very unexpected email… from LAIKA. Yes that LAIAK. The stop-motion animation studio behind films such as Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. Crazy right?

Well they said they loved my YouTube channel (omg what?)and that they wanted to do a collaboration with me to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of their film ParaNorman! Holy bananas batman! They said they were interested in having me and four other filmmakers recreate iconic scenes from the movie in live action. Basically my head exploded.

If you didn’t already know, I love zombies. I mean I’ve made several zombie shorts, including my award winning film Zombie Debt and my viral video Plants vs Zombies, so obviously I jumped at the chance to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of one of the few stop motion zombies movies out there.

I’m also a huge fan of ParaNorman and everything LAIKA. I’ve always loved the look and feel of stop motion films and I feel like no one does it better than LAIKA. The immense detail they put into every shot makes their world feel so authentic and real while still having that quirky fun stop motion vibe. Their characters and stories always seem to resonate and feel timeless.

So excited and honestly still in shock, I jumped at the chance to recreate and direct the scene where Norman help’s Neil play fetch with his dead dog Bub. Bub to be played by Spence of course!

This scene feels especially personal to me, because one of the themes, both in the scene and overall in the film, is reconnecting with loved ones who have passed. I haven’t talked about this on the channel before, but at the beginning of 2021 my father passed away unexpectedly. Due to covid and him being immune compromised I hadn’t seen him in person for over two years.

Thus this beautiful scene of Neil connecting with his long lost best friend while forging a new friendship touched my heart. I love how ParaNorman is a story about grief and how western cultural norms tell us we need to move on, when really maybe we can still have a connection to those who have passed and still remember them every day.

So I’m super excited to be working on this project and I plan to keep you updated along the way with more behind the scenes posts and vlogs about the process. Plus the final live action version of the scenes will be posted both on the LAIKA YouTube channel and on each filmmaker’s personal YouTube channels, so keep an eye out for mine and other filmmaker’s posts!

And just to give you a fun sneak peek, here’s some behind the scenes footage for the location scout I already did for this project.

I can not wait to tell you more so stay tuned!

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