Forest Story: John Dods

Who is John Dods and what is his latest story all about?

John Dods is part mad scientist, part comedian and part special effects veteran. At least that is the best description I can come up with from getting to know him better through Facebook. Forest Story is his latest....well, the process of completing what he started many years ago on film. As with many stop motion animators, at some point real life takes over. Jobs come up, family matters arise and projects get put on hold. So for John, he is happy to get back into making his film and is showing off his work in several places on the internet.

If you want to know what John has done you might want to check out his IMDb page. It lists all the films he's worked on, many that most of you visiting here have either seen or heard about. Then is Johns official web site that he put together. The navigation is sparse so you need click a lot to make it through, but you won't be disappointed. There are many pictures and things to read along the way. If you want to see lots of behind the scenes pictures of John and people he has worked with (not to mention some awesome creatures and sculpts) then check out his gallery on Facebook here.

Finally make sure to look at Johns Vimeo page full of teasers for the Forest Story film over here. The entire film isn't released on the internet just yet, but there are some very long clips to watch. Just like the one below.

Dim lights

Comments (2)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Forest Story - 30 Years In The Making
written by Ron Cole, January 14, 2012

The first time I ever saw a clip from Forest Story it was a clip shown in a TV special on the making of The Empire Strikes Back. It was in a segment in which they explained the process used to create the AT-AT walkers and the clip from Forest Story was used to show another example of this mysterious process called 'stop motion animation'.
I became a fan of John Dods, having seen his work in magazines and the film The Deadly Spawn back in the early 80's . Over the years since then, I've had the pleasure of getting to know John and work with him on a number of projects, I'm proud to have come to have him as a personal friend.

But all these years later, that 'Grog film' (Forest Story) has been waiting to be finished! In a really big loop, it turns out that the completion of my film 'In the Fall of Gravity' pushed the stop motion button in John to get him back to business on Forest Story... a big loop because it was partially John's articles in Cinemagic Magazine back in the early 80's (when I was still a teenager) that started the bug in me to get into stop motion in the first place.

So John has gone through the process of getting all his original 16mm footage duplicated and color corrected digitally and is back to work with the Grogs in the forest.

• 
• +0
• 
• 

...
written by Jesse O, January 16, 2012

Your film helped push his to completion!? Wow, impressive, you must feel pretty happy about that, being a fan and all.

• 
• +0
• 
• 

Name

Email

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (Registered users only)

Add Comment