Elliot Lobell's stop-motion short Edward took seven years, built and shot almost single-handed in a basement

Edward is a seven-minute stop-motion horror short by Elliot Lobell. Its main character is a sideshow performer with a parasitic twin, set in a weathered, hand-built world drawn from Coney Island sideshow culture and early-20th-century medical oddities. Lobell calls it more psychological than frightening. In an interview published by League of Filmmakers on 7 October 2026 as part of its FilmQuest (Provo, Utah) coverage, he describes making it almost single-handed. He wrote, built the puppets, painted, animated and shot the film himself, with occasional help from friends. Writing began in 2018, and the production took seven years. Most of the film's eight or nine sets (the article gives both counts) were built and shot in his basement. Lobell had about fifteen years of stop-motion and digital animation behind him and was working mainly in post-production when he started. What he wanted from Edward was something tangible, shot in camera and made by hand.

Two points from the interview are worth keeping. The first is about what finally finished the film. In 2025 a three-month residency from 14C, a Jersey City arts organisation, gave Lobell free studio space. For the first time he could build sets and animate at the same time, and he could bring in director of photography Zach Poots to shoot the largest set pieces. The residency also had a move-out date. Lobell says the lack of deadlines had stretched the project out, and this was its first real finish line. The second is about performance. Early on he treated the lead as a puppet to be moved frame by frame; after the first couple of scenes he found himself acting through it instead. He says his hardest decision was to keep going rather than reshoot the many shots he wanted to redo, carrying what he learned into the rest of the film.

According to the article, Edward premiered at the Coney Island Film Festival, where it won Best Animated Film. It also won Best Animation at the New York Short Film Festival and had its European premiere at Ravenheart in Oslo. Its eight festival selections so far include Screamfest LA and the Woodstock Film Festival, which the article describes as Oscar-qualifying. The lessons about time and deadlines are folded into the Wiki's page on the director-maker on a small stop-motion production.