First Look: ‘Frankenweenie’ Short ‘Captain Sparky vs. the Flying Saucers’
Posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2012 by Angie Han
If you caught Frankenweenie this fall, you probably recall that one of Victor and Sparky’s hobbies involved making adorably amateurish Super 8 films. Now one of their little home movies is about to get a real-life release. Disney has unveiled the first images from Captain Sparky vs. the Flying Saucers, a short film that will appear as a special feature on Frankenweenie‘s Blu-ray/DVD release. Check them out after the jump.
Since Victor’s status as a fictional character hinders his ability to make a real film, he’s getting some help from non-fictional humans including Frankenweenie animation supervisor Mark Waring, who directed, and Frankenweenie co-producer Derek Frey, who wrote. The movie-within-a-movie revolves around Sparky’s attempts to save the world from attacking alien spaceships. He’ll be helped or hindered in his quest by neighborhood cat Mr. Whiskers, who makes a return appearance.
The images come courtesy of USA Today. One shows Sparky in a makeshift rocket, while the other has Victor and Sparky watching a reel of something.
It looks good, but Waring may be hoping it doesn’t look too good. As a professional using high-end technology, Waring revealed that one of his his challenges was making Captain Sparky vs. the Flying Saucers look sufficiently amateurish and low-tech. “In the short, there are a few sections of (Victor) trying to very early use stop-frame technique,” he said. “The whole thing’s stop-frame, so how do you make it look more stop-frame than it actually is?”
In the end, he found that the key was to add in purposeful mistakes like shaky camerawork, ill-concealed equipment, and “all of those things to get the sense of how that would actually be if you made the film as a kid.” For a young, DIY filmmaker, “mistakes would be kept in because you don’t know how to change them — you haven’t got a whole team of special-effects people to paint the wires out.”
Captain Sparky vs. the Flying Saucers runs about two and a half minutes, and will hit when the Blu-ray/DVD does on January 8. And if you really love it, Waring says there could be more where that came from — perhaps in the form of a sequel from Tim Burton. “Everything’s in place. There’s a whole world waiting,” he said. “If there’s any chance of a Frankenweenie 2, I’m sure everybody would love it.”
