Lee Hardcastle - BAF

Seeing Lee Hardcastle speak was the last event on our agenda for the first day.
It was presented in an interview style, where a representative was asking Hardcastle questions about his work/career, and what he intends to do next.

They talked about his first claymation piece, An Alien Claymation. It's obvious after watching this, be he explained how he is inspired by horror films, and he likes watching gory things. I'm not such a big fan of gore, but I think he did this piece well; with nice camera angles that follow the action, to make you feel more a part of the film. I liked how he portrayed the explosions and how the final, giant alien was defeated, showing the inside of the head as the saw cut through it.



He talked about how he made his next film "Dead Corps", inspired by GI Joe and Resident Evil, he had no plan when going into this project. I guess that makes sense since making it up as he goes along is his favourite approach to making a film, which is why he prefers to do his own work instead of commercial.

I liked the sense of humour shown in his next project: The Evil Dead in 60 seconds. The simple character design and structure were becoming his distinctive style, which Youtubers were enjoying watching. It was this film that got him "Youtube famous", and he started getting paid for it; talking about how it sustained him financially.



After the major success with this claymation, he wanted to figure out what people liked about the film, to develop on from there to sustain his successes.

So the next thing he came up with was "Pingu's the thing", which was an instant hit. He created it as a parody of "The Thing", which audiences, even famous ones such as Simon Pegg, loved. However Hardcastle got into trouble for it, as the creators of "Pingu" claimed he was breeching the terms of copyright, so the film got shut down.

However, determined for his ideas to be successful, he continued on to make a series called "Claycats", the one showed to us at BAF was this:



"Claycat's The Raid" has a similar style to Pingu, but with Hardcastle's twist to the story. He explained how he made the flare from the guns as they're firing:
Using a material called iron wool, he would light it on fire, then use a long exposure on a DSLR camera, to give the impression that it's actually firing.

After this success, Hardcastle was even more established in the claymation world. Which is why ABC selected him to be a part of their project, The ABCs of Death; which involved 26 animators to create 26 short films, one per letter of the alphabet. This is where Hardcastle discovered "T is for Toilet".


I personally find this film too gory, as I'm sure some other squeamish people do. However I can see how his style and technique has developed from the first film he made, actually creating characters in more detail with more of a storyline.

The final film shown was his sequel to "T is for Toilet", "Ghostburger". This shows even further character development as it continues to play on the boys fear of toilets. Unfortunately most of my class and I had to leave early to catch our train back home, so I missed the conversation that went on afterwards, I'm assuming about how he created his longest film.

Overall I found Lee Hardcastle's story informative, as he explained his career and how he made his films, but his story lines are too gory for me to enjoy, despite the light sense of humour.