Max Landman’s Out-Of-This-World Short ‘Baloney Beacon’ Features Creatures Made Entirely From Balloons

Today’s Cartoon Brew pick is the otherworldly stop-motion short Baloney Beacon, featuring characters and special effects made using balloons.

The short’s director, Max Landman, has been a professional balloon twister in the Bay Area for 13 years, but when the pandemic hit, there were no parties where he could continue the practice. So, he decided to combine that skill set with his passion for animation and make a stop-motion film featuring balloon characters. The result was Baloney Beacon, available to watch here:

Landman explained the exercise to Cartoon Brew, saying:

I approached this film as an artistic experiment since I had only tried animating with balloons a couple of times before. Baloney Beacon’s loose narrative structure is the result of its extemporaneous production. The film was made without any storyboards and with minimal planning in general. At least a minute and a half of the footage was animated before I had any idea what the story was going to be. I wanted the film to feel as alien as possible as if it were a window into another dimension, so I deliberately emphasized the strangeness and uncanniness of balloons as an art medium. Ultimately, I decided that it needed to be set in outer space with nearly blank backgrounds to highlight the sculptures on screen.

If the goal was to create something alien, Landman succeeded with aplomb. The characters all feel familiar enough to be recognizable as living beings but strange enough to certainly not be terrestrial in origin. The film’s out-of-this-world nature is enhanced by distorted music and sound effects that perfectly match its peculiar aesthetic.

Landman animated the short entirely by himself and worked with Sarah Galvin on the soundtrack. Almost every shot was filmed in front of a green screen and composited together in Adobe After Effects.