The Film Industry: Now an Equal Opportunity Employer
In many cases, success acts as the best promotional advertisement. It doesn’t take more than a single first-place cross country runner to initiate a spike in Nike sales, or an exemplary actor to charmingly draw in record-breaking ticket sales for Warner Bros. Pictures. Three young gentlemen–Stuart Bury, Jeremy Casper, and Isaiah Powers–have happened upon the role of poster boys for Dragon Stop Motion. Silver medal winner of the 37th Student Academy Awards, their six-minute short “Dried Up” exemplified the ease and efficiency of animated film now made accessible with such programs. From “serious college and high school students” such as the three, Dragon Stop Motion and other 
such programs are expanding their reach to other hands: autistic children. The user-friendly functioning now enables those deprived of expression and communication to more conveniently circumnavigate the realms of speech and writing, too laden with semantic structure and the pressure of articulation. By sanctioning a greater threshold of ability, these new functions translate to new faculties for those barred from the freedom of self-expression. Peter Wayner of The New York Times reviews this program in its success and outreach to Arts & Technology:
“To simulate movement and expression, animators bend or twist their objects ever so slightly between shots, a painstaking process that makes it difficult to achieve consistency from frame to frame. But now, software can help remedy that, with programs that help check the alignment of the camera and the lighting of the scene while letting the animator flip between recent images to see if the items are moving realistically.
That part of the process — synchronizing the shots — was what made it difficult for amateurs to make a good movie. “We have one really solid product, and we make it reachable for a serious college or high school student, considering the gadgets that kids have these days,” said Jamie Caliri, a stop-action film director and a founder of Dragon Stop. His co-founder and brother, Dyami, is the software programmer.
“I really enjoy putting the real tools into someone’s hands.”
“Young kids can make a film in their room and distribute it and have half a million people view it,” said Mr. Howell. “Very young kids can have huge audiences for their work. Not long ago, it was impossible to consider someone that young having access to an audience that large. Students of the art can find hundreds of stop-motion films on video-sharing sites like YouTube, many of which are constructed by children who are younger than 10.”
Mr. Howell also says that many schools, and even some medical centers, are using the software to tell stories because it lets children express themselves when traditional words fail them.
“It’s become the software of choice for working with autistic children,” said Mr. Howell. “They’re uncovering issues that they’re finding hard to talk about conventionally or by writing down, but they’re quite comfortable making a film about it.” “
See for yourself in 6 minutes and 8 seconds what technology has made possible; Bury, Casper, and Powers’ “Dried Up:”
