Conception

The Tin Woods as a script began over six years ago. My buddy Mattzilla, who works in stop motion, was always bugging me to help him make a real film. Mostly he wanted to do a Godzilla film. He wanted to sculpt and mold a recreation of the original Godzilla and animate a film around it. My answer was pretty direct. “ I don’t want to put all this work into a fan film and then wind up with a cease and desist letter from Toho.” I don’t know if that would have actually happened, but stop motion is a lot of work and I’d like to be able to at least share it.

So I thought about other ideas we could do together. Something that we were BOTH passionate about. Then one day he showed off a sculpture of the Tin Woodman he had made. It couldn’t move, it was just a statue. But as soon as I saw it, I knew what story I wanted to see in stop motion. And this one is public domain!

I was familiar with the grotesque backstory of the Tin Woodman but only in passing. The return to Oz is one of my most watched childhood films, I remember sliding the sofas together to make a Gump while watching and acting out the scenes. Later in life when I began to study film, I was gifted a book on the craft of editing by Return to Oz’s director, Walter Murch. In it he described his love of the original Oz books, and thus I learned to love them too.

I had read most of the early Oz books by the time Mattzilla had show me his sculpture, but sought out the Tin Woodman of Oz specifically to find a way to adapt his story. The first draft came pretty quickly, though it wasn’t until a few months later that I added one final scene at the end that also inspired the name of the film.

Mattzilla was thrilled and excited with the initial script but his job (and mine) kept us from doing much more than make a little headway in the design of the main puppet. Days turned into month and then turned into years.

Then one day in early 2018, Mattzilla found himself between jobs and told me “We should start this film now. I have the time.”

So we got started up again. I had actually been through some heavy medical trauma in the interim and looking at the script again reignited my fascination with the character. I made a handful of small revisions and we decided that in order to do the film the right way, with the right gear and the right materials, we would need a bit of start-up capitol. And so I began to plan our Kickstarter campaign.