Finalist: Zach Macias

Zach Macias is a second-year Design | Media Arts student at UCLA from Northern California. He has been doing stop-motion animation since 2004.

Films

Stranger Than Fishin'

The idea for Stranger than Fishin' originated over spring break in 2010. It had been a while since I had animated something, and I needed any excuse to get a film started, so I thought of a simple, one joke idea about a guy on a fishing trip. The film was planned to be no more than a minute long, but I only managed to shoot about half of the intended animation over the break, so I put the film on hiatus until I was next available to work on it. The time away from the project gave me an opportunity to develop the initial concept a little more until it grew into a slightly more ambitious story. Once I had the whole idea mapped out in my head, I was able to take that and pick up from where I had left off once I went home for the summer.

The Profession

The initial inspiration for this film came out of another LEGO animation I saw on YouTube called "The Lego Ultimatum," which was a shot-for-shot recreation of the Bourne/Desh fight scene from "The Bourne Ultimatum." I wanted to try my hand at that kind of intense, fast-paced, Bourne-style fight sequence in stop-motion, but I didn't want to simply make a random action scene, so I tried to fashion some sort of story around it. So while the obvious centerpiece of the film is the hand-to-hand combat sequence, the film itself is intended as a tongue-in-cheek homage to the spy thriller genre, as well as the endearing bravado of its heroes/stars.