Stop motion - start acting!

This is what I've been doing for the last two weeks.

If you want to stop drinking, there is no better way than to attempt to make a stop motion film. You need to be sober to the point of not even having any alcohol in your blood from last week, never mind last night. Otherwise, you knock over a bit of the set on shot number 8,956 and so spend the next hour constructively crying.

Oh, and the end result is always not as good as you'd hoped, but you think 'no WAY am I doing that again...unless I get more lego!'

My idea for a short is a film about the TV, Territorial Vikings. They do viking lego. Hummmn.

So why do people make these films and put them on Youtube and such. I think there are three reasons.

First, you are a frustrated filmaker. You always wanted to make movies and now, finally, the technology is there not only to make films but to distribute them! Your short about a man who has a romantic liasion with a box of cereal can be shot in the morning, edited in the evening and by bed-time, somebody in Hong Kong can be logging on to comment that it's shit.

Second, you're getting paid to do it or in some other way rewarded. There is quite a lot of commercial content on Youtube, some of it is even there intentionally. Or, maybe the reward is non-material. Maybe you have put together a film showing in graphic terms how you will end it all by masturbating yourself to death in a 'photo-me' booth if Mandy Simkins does not go out with you. This embodies not just live-action, but stop motion animation as you could actually present Mandy with a flicker-book of you pleasuring yourself, made from the photos you had taken in the booth. Warning, may result in prosecution, or an award from the German film board.

Lastly, peer approval. This is the big one. We all like to be liked. Some even just like to be noticed. So if you post a movie of badger puppets shooting up and call it 'badgerspotting' or something, and so prompt several emotional retards to rate it as cool, you get a sense of self worth. If you get one thousand comments saying it's shit, then I suggest turning to a career in writing, or go back to spanking your plank at the nearest photo-me to get your jollies.