This is Vonky’s POV from within her helicopter helmet and night vision goggles. She prepares to throw The Switch on Kim’s order, to start their sinister operation.

This is a good view of the album signed by her father, the cocaine-covered table, and my doomsday USB hub made by ThinkGeek.

My wife and I shot this live on my iPhone 11 Pro. She’s wearing latex gloves for extra creepy POSER effect. Shots like this are an homage to Thunderbirds, the British “Supermarionation” TV show from the 1960s. They always threw in a few live close-up shots whenever a puppet had to do something with human dexterity.

We slowly creep away from a gilded portrait of Kim Jong-il’s charming but sinister puppet character from Team America: World Police.

This is a rather beautiful shot, because I used some pearlescent paint on the bunker walls and bombarded the scene with photons from a 365 nm wavelength black light. I slid that light along a yardstick in order to cast shadows through an as-yet-unseen cage.

And what we really don’t yet grasp is why the portrait is slowly mirroring upon itself to become an oddly symmetrical face. This illusion is revealed in the next shot, but the optical setup here had to be very precise for this to work.

Vonky puts a very special album on her Barbie Princess record player so Kim and Dennis can sing along.

This prop actually turns, blinks and plays a Disney song. I customized it a bit with a photo of Ivanka playing dress-up.

In order to capture the rotation and blinky light, I had to make the song play over and over again while shooting this lengthy scene. Oh boy, did that get annoying.

And quite by accident, I discovered that if I slowed its song way down, it complemented Rocket Man in such a creepy way. So that became part of the score, along with Dennis & Kim’s torturous duet.

This is another one of my super fun Splatter Shots, which made all the menial animation work worth it.

This time, as Kim gives the “BOOM!” signal to Vonky, Dennis takes an axe to Carmen’s brain. And again, I flipped all eight colors of neon paint from the brain and onto Kim with one or two exposures per color.

Shots 411 and 412 get intercut a few times for effect.

While Kim looms over Dennis, Vonky finishes her preparation on the laptop.

By now the battery in that desk lamp was running on fumes. It was also a major pain because with every slightest bump, I had to reset it with an onionskin assist in Dragonframe.

The duet is now in full swing, up to the line “I miss my wife.” So here we introduce the remains of Rodman’s former wife, Carmen Electra.

Yep it’s clear that Dennis loved her, and misses her. But it’s not clear what happened to her. And again, whose bones are littering Dennis’ cage?

So many questions.

That’s a creepy little prop that I painted in neon, in sort of a Mexican sugar skull style. I also set some plastic diamonds in her eye sockets to catch whatever light I could. See if you can spot that during her close-ups, especially in a later Act.

Okay, here’s a shot for you. See that crystal bowl on Kim’s table? It’s full of cocaine. Well not real cocaine — just talcum powder. Kim is so out of control in this scene (think Donald Trump, Jr.) that he exhales into the bowl and shoots cocaine everywhere.

To pull off this practical effect, I drilled a hole in the bottom of the bowl and through the table. Then I ran a 1/32” inside diameter silicone tube through it, connected to a syringe, and secured the bowl to to table with a bit of Fun-Tak putty.

The timing was tricky but I managed to catch a few good puffs of powder jetting up into the air with each plunge of the syringe.

Yes, I could have done this all in post with my ProSmoke plug-in, but where’s the fun in that?

Also note the record album in the table. That’s a 1:6 scale version of Elton John’s Rocket Man, which I printed on photo paper. The album is infamously signed by Donald Trump, as his love letter to Kim Jong-un in real life. Yep, that actually happened in 2018. It was actually a CD, but since POSERS is all about the retro, I had to go with vinyl.

While the two men continue to sing, Vonky assists Kim into some gold chains that hang from the ceiling. The chains lift him up off the floor and catapult him into the cage bars feet first.

I did this by looping the long paperclip chain through the ceiling panel’s open grid, and then sliding the panel back and forth in measured increments along the set’s rails.

Private audiences find this jarring, which makes me smile an evil smile. Kim is, after all, inflicting the worst possible psychological torture on this poor creature. Because he is, after all, a murderous psychopath.

This was a really fun shot. Still singing with Kim heckling him on, Dennis chops into a bone and splatters neon paint all over the bunker wall.

I did that by dipping a wooden stick in each color of paint and then flipping it toward the back wall from inside the cage until I got the spray pattern I wanted for each color. So for each of eight colors, I shot one frame. That way it looks like the splatter happens in real time.

It’s generally challenging to work with liquids in stop motion, but I’m sure you’ll agree this is a great special effect.

Why neon paint? And what is its significance? We don’t know. It could be POSER blood. Or it could be their spirit. That’s up to audience interpretation. But for sure, neon paint glows wonderfully under black light. Pure psychedelia.

Throughout this and other scenes, I’m using UV (black) light in two wavelengths: 395 and 365 nm. The latter is considered medical grade, used for sterilizing instruments. And as I worked under them for hours, posing puppets, I actually felt my hands get irradiated. Who knows whether that will shorten my life span?

It was during this scene that I snapped Rodman’s knee off and couldn’t readily fix it. So again, I chose to turn a bug into a feature. After the big splatter chop, the camera tilts back down to show Dennis holding his own severed leg in his lap. I would later reattach it with Frog Tape, under his wedding dress.

And yes, Frog Tape is an indispensable tool for an animator. As are various rubber-tipped sculpting tools and even metal dental hygiene tools like picks and mirrors. Not to mention all the various types of glue and putty you’ll need to make more permanent or semi-permanent adhesions.

Those sticky options range everywhere from the amazing Museum Gel, to Fun-Tak, to Rubber Cement, to Vinyl Cement, to Gorilla Glue, to Testers Model Glue, to Super Glue, to Lok-Tite 495 — the Bad Boy of all adhesives.

As Dennis sings the song, he resumes chopping up bones with an axe. But the bones of what? Or who?

This is a slow, corkscrewy track shot done with my slider crammed inside the cage with Dennis. The cage is actually a metal pet carrier that has collapsible sides and a two swinging gates, one on the end and one on the top. In this case, I had to remove the end entirely to squeeze my rather bulky rig inside. But the shot really feels like we’re trapped in someone’s Hell.