The Night of the Toys

This is an old video, called “The Night of the Toys”, made by me and four classmates when we were in 6th grade. I think it was filmed in the spring of 1982. One week our class was divided into groups of 5-6 students and each group then wrote and filmed a short movie. Most groups used one of the early (and huge) camcorders, but my group (being the overachievers) decided to make a stop-motion movie, using Super 8 cameras…

We shot the movie in a little over a week (using weekends and a couple of extra days our teacher gave to us, if I remember correctly), at the home of one of my best friends, and despite some errors (for example taking just one picture before moving the items, we should have taken two and moved the toys less between the frames) it turned out surprisingly good, if I may say so myself.

Some years ago, my cousin converted the movie into digital format, and I re-cut it using Sony Vegas. I was then able to slow down some of the really fast scenes, and speed up or shorten some other scenes. I also recut the film to avoid some artifacts at the splicing locations, and I also redid the titles from scratch. Finally I added some music and sound effects. You can see the result below. Remember, this was 14 years before Toy Story… Also, the titles are in Swedish.