Justin Diver poses with the dozens of plasticine figures he constructed to create his short clay animation film, Rotten Organics. The film, which tells the story of a battle between gangs of fruits and vegetables, won the student short film competition at the North Bay Film Festival last weekend.
SOUTH RIVER — The film’s about a battle of epic proportions.
Full of fight scenes and gore.
It’s not between armies, nor mythical creatures.
Rather it’s between, asparagus and grapes. Carrots and oranges.
Rotten Organics tells the story of a confrontation between troops of fruits and vegetables.
It’s this unique film that landed its young animator the top spot at a local film festival.
South River teen Justin Diver’s short film was selected as the winner in the student category of the Show Us Your Shorts competition, held as part of North Bay Film Festival.
The festival ran from Feb. 8 to 10 at Galaxy Cinemas in North Bay.
Diver, a Grade 11 student at Almaguin Highlands Secondary School (AHSS), created Rotten Organics originally as a project in a Grade 12 communications technology class he’s enrolled in.
The assignment was to create any short film, but Diver chose to use claymation as his medium.
Claymation is the art of creating films using clay-modelled figures and stop-motion animation.
The creator uses his malleable figures to set scenes and records them, frame by frame, on either film or digital media.
“I picked claymation because I liked it the best,” he said. “I’ve always liked playing with plasticine.”
Before he could shoot the film, Diver had to create his characters: a cast of plasticine fruits and vegetables.
He still has the dozens upon dozens of characters and props he painstakingly moulded.
Diver said he guessed they took about two weeks to complete.
The film features the vegetables, who are gangsters, fighting the fruit, who are metalheads, explained Diver.
It at first appears the troop of vegetables will prevail, because they have the seemingly all-powerful asparagus on their side.
But their efforts are then thwarted by the sneaky metalhead grape.
It took Diver about a week to complete shooting the scene, which meant thousands of pose changes and snapshots.
To achieve movement, clay animation filmmakers must move their subjects just slightly for each frame. When many frames, or singular pictures, are played back, there’s the illusion of movement.
“There were 5,000 pictures, I think,” he said.
The whole war is set to music Diver found online, which required no licence to use.
Rotten Organics was all shot on Diver’s mother’s digital camera in the family basement.
After submitting the film to his teacher — he hasn’t got the grade back on the award-winning movie — he was encouraged to submit it in the student category of the short film contest.
Last weekend marked the fifth anniversary of the North Bay Film Festival. Along with the regular amateur short film competition, this year marked the first that the contest included a student category. Students from all over Northern Ontario were encouraged to submit their films between one and three minutes long.
Diver attended the screening at the festival, where he got to see his masterpiece on the big screen. Two other films done by students from his class were also shown.
“There was a lot of good ones,” he said.
Diver’s came out the victor, and he brought home a plaque as well as a $250 prize.
He’s already thinking about making another claymation piece,
Rotten Organics was actually the second in a series. The first he completed when everyone in his class were assigned to create a claymation short.
His winning film, however, was much better, Diver said. “Definitely this one, I put more time in it.”
But the epic fruit and veggie battle story’s not over yet, he said.
“I’m thinking about making a prelude to how it all started.”
Editorial
