Stop-motion animation–where a puppet is moved by an animator and photographed frame-by-frame to create the illusion of motion–is a special-effect technique that is as old as the movies themselves, but in recent years it’s been on the wane, with only a couple high-profile animators (such as Aardman Films of Wallace and Gromit and Harry Selick, director of Nightmare Before Christmas) still carrying the torch. For most animators, professional and amateur alike, digital has superseded the physical.

Editor’s Note 12/27/13 Happy (almost) New Year! We’re saying good-bye to 2013 by revisiting some of our favorite stories of the year. Enjoy.

Even so, stop-motion animation can be used to create an effect that computer animation can not. For proof, just look at Operator. With a plot best described as Alien meets 1984 with a dash of zombie horror thrown in, Operator is one of the creepiest movies of the year. And it was all done by one filmmaker, Sam Barnett, who spent eight months playing with puppets.

The plot of Operator is relatively simple. Bob is an Orwellian drone working for Infocorp, a faceless, efficiency-obsessed megacorporation of the future. His job is to clock in every day, screwing plugs into lettered sockets according to the verbal instructions of an overhead computer, which cites him if he takes too long changing any one plug. Bob manages to get through this dehumanizing drudgery by thinking of his family, until one day, when a biomechanical parasite crawls through the sockets and tries to take over Bob’s mind.

I wanted to make a film that allowed people to empathize with someone who is really powerless.

“At a basic level, I wanted to make a film that allowed people to empathize with someone who is really powerless,” Barnett tells Co. Design. “Someone who is trapped in a system against which they have no defense.”





Mission accomplished. The whole film is extremely unsettling, and the use of stop-motion animation to emphasize the unreal, dreamlike creepiness of the premise is very much in keeping with other, better known animators, like Czech stop-motion legend Jan Švankmajer. But it also gives animated films a tangibility they wouldn’t other have, Barnett says, a fact that he took advantage of to bring to life his tale of dystopian corporate bio-horror.

“In stop-motion, everything is very specific,” Barnett says. “Anything you animate is a real object that is not only full of imperfections, but a history of the things it has been through. It is very hard to create this feeling of history in 3-D.”