Reddit AMA Recap: The creators of ‘Monster Island’

Not a monster AMA, but lots of footprints.

Justin Michael and Harry Chaskin recently did a Reddit AMA where the guys talked about their newest animated short Monster Island. While it wasn’t a crazy busy session, there were some good questions and anecdotes featuring advice on how to direct, write, and produce stop motion animation. Here are some highlights from the aforementioned AMA:

On more Monster Island monsters

We’re longtime fans of old-school (and new-school) giant monster movies of the Toho variety and beyond. We’d love to take on the biggies: Mothra, King Ghidorah, Rodan, Mechagodzilla and even smaller ones like Hedorah and Biollante. It’d be really fun to include Harryhausen beasts and cryptozoology style guys in there as well.

On how creators Justin and Harry got into making cartoons.

JUSTIN: Yeah! Well, kind of. Harry and I have known each other since elementary school and when I met him he had already animated stop-motion shorts with his family. I was just a dude who was realllllly into cartoons and we honestly became friends by making movies in each other’s garages. I learned a lot about behind the scenes animation from Harry. We met Dan in college – he and I did comedy together and still perform over at UCB to this day. He likes Animaniacs a bunch!

HARRY: Yup, Justin and I were animating our action figures with an old Super 8 camera when we were 12 years old! I’d always been interested in animation but didn’t get into it in a serious way until college where I was studying live-action filmmaking.
I’m kind of a control freak and was getting increasingly frustrated with the lack of visual control that was possible on no/low-budget live action projects, so I started building miniatures and working more and more with stop-motion. I love how you can create an entire visually distinct universe on a 4’x4′ table.

On early inspirations:

JUSTIN: For me, it was seeing “The Wrong Trousers” in middle school while I hung out at my great grandma’s place. I remember being absolutely floored by how cool and different it looked. I was really drawn to the texture, the fact that you could SEE thumbprints on the clay. Also, evil penguin pretending to be a chicken? CHECK. Harry probably has a much much much cooler answer for later.

HARRY: That’s so cool you got to know Art Clokey! The first stop-mo experience I can remember is watching Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island on VHS with my dad. I was fascinated with the giant crab monster, and I recall my dad explaining to me how the effect was achieved. After that, I was hooked!

On the most challenging part of making stop-motion animation:

HARRY: Yeah! Visual continuity is definitely tricky. Having all your completed shots handy to review as you shoot helps. We use software called Dragonframe that allows you to import reference frames from previous angles and toggle between them.

We did have some continuity errors on Monster Island though. We shot several scenes with the water tower lid missing and had to photograph a separate element to cut out and add later in VFX.

Read more of Justin and Harry’s Reddit AMA here and watch Monster Island