My name is Tim Hyun and I’m an aspiring filmmaker. I fell in love with cinema at a young age watching Star Wars on TV and stop motion shorts on YouTube. I began to make my own movies with my LEGOs and my neighbors using grainy iPod cameras. When I came to LREI, I was able to take film classes for the first time, and soon realized that I wanted to be a filmmaker for a living. I specifically love stop motion due to its inherently creative nature and how it necessitates working with one’s hands. The idea for Troops goes back to when I was in middle school. I’d been watching Red vs. Blue and Plastic Apocalypse, two unconventionally animated (RvB is machinima, created using edited clips of staged gameplay from the Halo franchise, PA is stop motion) military web series that were anti-war in extremely different ways. Red vs. Blue is more comedic in nature and focuses on the pointlessness of war through mundanity, and Plastic Apocalypse is more dramatic and focuses on the almost self-indulgent brutality of war. I wrote entire notebooks full of concepts and character notes that I still have today. In junior year I did an honors project writing an episode of Troops, which is meant to be a series. Troops is a passion project through and through, and I am excited to jump into it.

For my Senior Project, I plan to create the first entry in the Troops series. It will be a stop-motion black comedy war short film featuring plastic soldiers that satirizes a militaristic society, emphasizes the ironic mundanity of a soldier’s life, and cuts down the distance of war. It will be 5 to 7 minutes long and will address the question of what makes a film anti-war. By the end of the week after spring break, I would like to have finished writing the script and storyboards and cleared out the storage room in the basement. I’ll have transported all my supplies, built my first set, and started filming by about a week or so later. City buildings will be made out of grey modeling foam, chain link fences out of mesh, and real sand and rocks will be used to create sets. Clever camera placement and the TV in my room will be my rear screen projection rig, and the use of tripods and small webcams will place the viewer directly in the scale of conflict (roughly 1:36). A variety of lights, including common desk lamps, film lights from the media room, a novelty “sunset lamp” and even flashlights will illuminate each set. I have nearly 20,000 plastic army men and dozens of vehicles, all of which will be put to good use as characters. Making rigid figures articulate is difficult, but it absolutely can be done through swapping poses and emoting through motion. Custom poses can be made through cutting and welding, thanks to the malleable and meltable nature of plastic. Shooting should take about three weeks depending on how many hours a day I work. Voice lines will be recorded intermittently with everything else. During this time, I will be doing community service in the park with other students on Mondays from 1 pm to 4 pm. The last few weeks will focus on editing, finishing sound, and possibly making a trailer. By the end of the project, the film will hopefully be completed and perfected down to every last detail.