The Ballad of Mary Slade walked away with the animation prize at Slamdance. © Robin Fuller.

In its strongest slate in the last four years, the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival showcased 14 animated shorts in competition. Filmmakers from around the world -- U.S., Canada, Hungary, U.K., Germany, Japan, North Korea and India -- created the films using a variety of animation techniques.

Director Robin Fuller's The Ballad of Mary Slade (3min., color, U.K.) won the Sparky Award for Best Animation at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival. The tragic tale of a murdered young woman, whose untimely demise brought on by passion and infidelity, is reenacted by the insects consuming her decaying body. Despite the macabre subject matter, Fuller has created a haunting love story using a combination of techniques.

The ants were puppets animated using stop-motion animation against a bluescreen. When the characters are physically interacting with an object on screen, a real prop was used, otherwise the background's were digitally composited from photographs. In scenes where the ants are interacting with the corpse's flesh, Fuller used latex over plasticine to create the torn and decaying soft tissue. The project took about six months of work.

Fuller studied animation at Norwich School of Art and Design. The Ballad of Mary Slade was his final film before completing his MFA and his first film to be shown on the festival circuit -- an auspicious introduction to a talented animator.

Eva is a love story that won over the judges to receive an honorable mention. © 2005 Eyefoolery.

Eva (9 min., b&w, Germany) received an honorable mention for Best Animated Film at the Slamdance Film Festival 2007. Director Martin Quaden tells a classic story of loneliness and love, with a twist. The love struck lady is an assembly of metal junk and electrical parts, with soulful eyes comprised of light bulbs. The object of her affection is a streetlamp on a set constructed of real props, including real grass that had to be watered. The film convincingly conveys the changing emotions of the title character through stop-motion animation.

When asked how long the film took to complete, Quaden shares, "The plan was one weekend and then additional weekend for reshoots. We were really blissfully ignorant. It took us four and a half years, stop and go." Taking on the project without any prior experience in stop-motion animation, Quaden shot without video assist, the common practice in that form of animation, instead instructing her animator how much to move the character while looking through the camera. The large-set took up so much room in the filmmakers' studio apartment, the sofa was left in the hallway for a year and a half, to the consternation of the landlady.

A native of Hamburg, Germany, Quaden studied film and photography at New York University. He has worked as a camera assistant and director of photography in the U.S. Currently he is a production manager on an animated feature in Hamburg and is developing his latest project, a stop-motion short titled Sminky Pinky.

Loom evokes a folk art influence. © Scott Kravitz.

In Loom (5min., color, USA), a bittersweet allegory of life and death, a street musician saves the life of a child, only to lose his own life, which transforms into a mere thread in the fabric of the quilt of heaven that a mysterious old woman is weaving. Director Scott Kravitz has delightfully art directed and designed the sets and characters of the film to invoke a look of folk art that thematically supports the fable-like nature of the story.

The exterior sets were based on photographs taken by the director in Romania. He liked the color palette, so he decided to make everything, including the people, fit that palette. The figures were six to eight inches high. The wheels on the old woman's wheelchair, were taken from a Barbie bicycle. "The larger you make the people, the larger you have to make the sets and that gets unwieldy," says Kravitz. "In my little apartment, I had to keep it pretty small." The heads of the expressive characters were sculpted. The eyelids, made from a soft clay and the eyes were the only part of the faces that moved. Beads were used for the eyes with the hole serving as the pupil. When the eye needed to move Kravitz would stick a pin into the hole, turn it and then shoot the frame. "The real expressiveness comes from the body. If it is all working together, then it reads," explains Kravitz. "That's always the challenge."