Sean Pecknold on Tennis, Oranges: a self-funded stop-motion short with one stage, one puppet set and three years of restarts

Tennis, Oranges is an 11-minute stop-motion short written, directed and produced by Sean Pecknold at Sing-Sing, the Los Angeles studio he runs with production designer Adi Goodrich. A robot vacuum burned out by its hospital cleaning job walks off for the day and finds a quiet street where two lonely rabbits are stuck in daily loops. In a Dragonframe showcase published on 20 October 2026, Pecknold traces the film to the studio's years on Chung King Road in Los Angeles' Chinatown (2014-2017): the rabbits are based on friends made there, and Goodrich's colour palette draws on the street as well as old photographs of 1970s hospitals, tennis courts and other Chinatowns. He wrote the script in 2019 and began production during the pandemic in the studio's Highland Park space, with the small crew that had just made stop-motion segments for the Netflix series Song Exploder.

The making-of account is mostly about logistics. Art director Emily Franz designed and built the two rabbit puppets, in synthetic fur with hand-painted eyes. Because the studio usually works in live action, Pecknold, who also served as cinematographer and lighter, says the sets were built and the shots framed and lit on live-action principles. There was one shooting stage and one set of puppets, so only one set could be shot at a time; the opening forest dance was staged while the studio was also animating Featherweight, a multiplane paper stop-motion project. The film was self-funded, which meant a month or so of animation followed by months on hold for commissioned work. Pecknold expected eight or nine months and it took three years, finishing in autumn 2023. What kept it moving, he says, was bringing in a new animator whenever a free fortnight or month opened up, including people between larger stop-motion productions in Portland and Los Angeles. The credits list nine animators, Pecknold among them, and a grant from Rooftop Films.

According to the article, the short spent about two years on the festival circuit with 190 official selections, and was featured by Short of the Week and as a Vimeo Staff Pick Premiere. Short of the Week's YouTube release of the full film is linked on the work page. The production lessons are folded into the Wiki pages on the director-maker on a small stop-motion production and on duplicate puppets and parallel stages.