This Stop Motion Animation Is a Machinist’s Dream

Brett Foxwell wrote in to share the culmination of 10 years of hard work. This is FABRICATED, a stop motion story about an imaginary future, beyond humanity. Everything you see was design and built by Brett, from the characters to the sets, and even the rigs to allow for smooth camera movement.

As he states in the making-of video below, the sets would completely consume the apartments he would be living in and on more than one occasion, he’s had to move, hauling all the sets with him to his new home.

I got curious about the actual physical construction though. Living in apartments usually doesn’t mix well with hobby machining. I asked where he actually made all the metal pieces:

I did not do any of the actual machining in my apartments (those were turned into full-size film sets). Over the years, I was lucky enough to have jobs where I could use the machine shops after hours. I also used friends’ shops and places like TechShop, when available. It was a challenge, and times when I had access to a good shop, I generally tried to build a modular system for set-building and camera motion control that would work in any new situation, for times in the future when I didn’t have easy access to a shop. There were times when I would stop an animation shot at 3am because of a technical problem, hop on my bike and head to the shop to machine a solution, and then return to complete the shot. Good times!