Harris Loureiro is good at stop-motion filmmaking. Really good. Insanely good.
Loureiro, a resident of Malaysia, has created a five-minute fan film that celebrates everything that's awesome about the Transformers. It's the best five minutes you'll spend all day, and remarkably his low-fi, zero-budget creation is significantly more fun than Michael Bay's latest big-screen spectacle.
The short film, called "Attack on Giant," features a knock-down drag-out brawl between the five evil Constructicons — who are known for combining to form one enormous robot — and hero Optimus Prime. There's no dialogue and very minimal visual effects, but it's filmed in a way that seems designed to evoke nostalgia for old-school Transformers fans, a.k.a. those who grew up watching the original cartoon and the animated movie. (Goosebumps are guaranteed when you hear a certain power ballad kick in.)
Should the words "stop-motion" make you cringe, fear not. This may be the video to end your reservations. Not only is the animation smooth, the robots and surfaces actually have realistic physics. One glimpse of the clever transformation animations between vehicles to robots, and you'll swear these toys have sprung straight out of the cartoon and come to life in the geekiest ways possible. Loureiro even managed to incorporate fluid camera moves and shaky-cam shots, and he makes terrific use of several familiar sound effects as well.
Based on his YouTube and Facebook pages, Harris Loureiro appears to specialize in stop-motion animation made using robot toys or action figures. He's made a number of them before, but this is by far his longest and most impressive to-date.
About the video, Loureiro says that he finished filming in September of 2013, but wasn't able to start editing it until May 2014. He hasn't revealed how long filming took, but there are posts to his Facebook wall that prove Loureiro was working on it as far back as November of 2013. He claims that there are a few shots that are cut off in the middle, which he attributes to a crashed hard drive. It's not easy to see what he's referring to, however. The film is so smartly done, so well polished, it feels like every shot was intentionally shot and edited as is.
Loureiro dedicates his film to "all Transformers G1 and 3P fans." So sit down, lower the lights and get ready for some giddy geek bliss.
