The toughest part of any stop motion project is keeping the camera perfectly still between frames, and that is where this one gets clever. Sigurd Gjesti Berge's 8-year-old son shot the whole film using the iMotion app on an iPad, and propped the tablet on its own front cover to act as a makeshift tripod. For a young animator working without proper gear, that seems like a genuinely smart workaround, and the framing holds together well enough that the story reads clearly from start to finish.
The set itself is a proper little city: baseplates joined together, brick-built buildings, minifigures, cars and a truck. There are nice small touches too, like a lamp post, a fire hydrant and a red railing along the street. My favourite piece of staging is a grey lever mechanism that tilts the front of a car upward, which reads as a crash about to happen. The curved road with dashed white lines and green borders along the edges gives the whole scene a tidy, finished look.
Story-wise, the film opens with normal traffic moving through the city before a truck flips over and takes down a lamp post in the crash sequence. A car and a cyclist then pile into the wreckage. The audio layer is the one part the maker helped with directly, editing in Premiere and adding free sound clips, so the engine noise, screeching tires and impact sounds carry the action.
The one open question for me is the lack of any spoken dialogue. Everything is conveyed through sound effects alone, which works here, though I would be curious whether a sequel might add voices or captions. Either way, the fact that everything besides the audio is the work of an 8-year-old makes this a very impressive piece of filmmaking.
Project by Sigurd Gjesti Berge. Watch it on their YouTube channel: