Smoking Kills

Smoking Kills is a 14-second stop-motion short film. It has a comedic tone and features two blue claymation characters: one smoking a cigarette and the other holding a gun. The film's background is white. The title at the start of the film is Smoking Kills.

The blue clay characters have been crudely put together and resemble what a child would make in their early school years. I think this was by design rather than a lack of modelling skill on the creator's part, but I may be wrong. One character appears to have an action-figure gun in their hand, and the other has a small cigarette in their mouth. The white background contrasts well with the blue characters and the red lettering at the beginning and end. The voices are robotic and distorted, which fits the overall production quality. There is very little dialogue, which is to be expected for such a short film. The stepping sound is overly loud and out of sync with the movement, which is a shame. The piano music at the beginning and end fits in well and reminds me of the music used in the silent films of the 1920’s.

Stop-motion filming can be painstaking, and creating only seconds of film can take hours. So this film still requires effort, even though the characters don't appear to be created with a great deal of skill or hard work. So some credit has to go to the creator for making this film, and the characters move at least at a basic level, with some smooth movement involved.

I believe the message is that Smoking Kills, but it’s portrayed in a comedic fashion. The message is lost at the beginning and would have been more impactful had it been at the end. Many educational videos try to add comedy to this serious topic, and they are often quite hard-hitting. This film, however, isn’t one of those and is unlikely to bring about any laughter either. It is an important message, with 10 per cent of adults still choosing to smoke in the UK and many deaths still attributed to smoking. So any attempts to bring this message to an audience are hugely important.

Overall, this is a low-quality film, although there is clear skill to making stop-motion films and time has no doubt been spent on this creation. The message is sadly lost, which is very disappointing. The crude nature of the modelling doesn’t detract and actually works well with the film’s simplistic style. The creator, Max Palmer, has a second film with a similar style called The Worm, so if you like this, it may be worth checking that out too. This film could motivate people to try filmmaking and experiment with claymation, so in that respect it could be positive.