Jan 2, 2024

Max Landman's out-of-this-world short story "Baloney Beacon" features a creature made entirely of balloons.

Today's Cartoon Brew is "Baloney Beacon," an otherworldly stop-motion short featuring balloon characters and special effects.

The director of this short, Max Landman, has been a professional balloon twister in the Bay Area for 13 years. So he decided to combine his skills with his passion for animation to create a stop-motion film using balloon characters. The result is "Baloney Beacon":

Landman explained the exercise to Cartoon Brew:

I had only tried animation with balloons a couple of times before, so I approached this film as an artistic experiment. The loose narrative structure of Baloney Beacon is the result of improvisation. The film was made without storyboards and with minimal planning in general. At least a minute and a half of footage was animated before we had any idea what the story would be about. I deliberately emphasized the strangeness and eeriness of balloons as an art medium, as I wanted the film to have as alien an atmosphere as possible, like a window into another dimension. Ultimately, I felt it necessary to set the work in outer space against a nearly blank background in order to highlight the screen sculpture.

If the goal was to create something alien, Landman succeeded admirably. The characters all feel familiar enough to be recognizable as living beings, but they are certainly not earthlings. The out-of-this-world nature of the film is enhanced by the distorted music and sound effects that perfectly match its unique aesthetic.

Landman animated the short entirely on his own and worked with Sarah Galvin on the soundtrack. Nearly all shots were shot in front of a green screen and composited in Adobe After Effects.