Here's a very interesting and creepy live-action stop-motion short film produced by Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite) called Drained. It tells the story of how "a man's addictions can destroy the woman he loves." It's actually really quite unsettling and sad, but it's also done very well.
In an interview with io9, director Nick Peterson explained the story saying,
It's an interesting story because everybody knows somebody in their life who has drained them, whether it's a brother who's always getting into trouble or a spouse who brings his or her problems home. This film doesn't end with a happy ending — but we chose not to, because it shows what happens when you do nothing. I recently directed a video for the band Five-Finger Death Punch that is an anti-suicide, anti-bullying video. That video went over well, as it showed that you can be saved. But for Drained, we played the down card. That may cost us on the popular approach, but we're showing consequences here, and that will emotionally resonate with certain viewers.
I honestly never expected to see anything like this from Heder who added:
Whether you're a fan of my previous material or not, I wanted to give audiences a sense of what my interests are — and those range from broad comedies to these experimental, dramatic shorts.
Watch the short film and share your thoughts with us on it.
Here are some Fun Facts about the film listed on their YouTube page:
Fun Facts:
• The funding was raised through kickstarter.com, a crowd-source funding website.
• To give this film a unique look, the entire film was shot with still photographs at a speed of 8 frames per second. All 254,000+ still frames were shot with a single Canon DSLR 7D camera.
• In order to compensate for the slow frame rate of 8 seconds, the actors had to move 3 times slower than normal while covered in makeup, wearing masks, and with blinding strobe lights flashing in sync with the camera at 8 flashes per second.
• While shooting the Director and DP were unable to look through the eyepiece of the camera and had to kind of guess where the actors were in the shot during each take.
• Shooting lasted for 10 days.
• Due to the sudden illness of the original actress, Andee Tims was cast to play the Woman the day before she began the shoot.
• Makeup took about 4-6 hours each day to apply, and about another hour each day to remove.
• Over 1000 condoms were used to build the condom suit.
• The final 8 second shot of the film took 14 hours and two animators to shoot, and 6 people 2 hours to clean all the goo from the floor.