Academy Award® winner Adam Elliot oversees an enormous amount of work to bring his stop-motion films to life. Over five months during Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns, Elliot drew 1600 storyboards, some of which you can see here. Storyboards help directors visualise the story and camera movement before shooting begins, creating a blueprint for filming. Alongside these, he also drew 200 characters, 200 sets and thousands of props, which were later handmade by a team of artists over a year. From the storyboards, a rough animation called an animatic was made, which provided a guide for each shot of the film. There’s not a single frame of CGI (computer-generated imagery) in Memoir of a Snail (2024), which took over 33 weeks and 135,000 photographs to shoot.
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Academy Award®-winning director Adam Elliot introduces us to the clay people and places that feature in his latest film.
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Not in ACMI's collection
On display until
1 November 2026
ACMI: Gallery 1
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Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
LN196851
Curatorial section
The Story of the Moving Image → Moving Worlds → MW-04. Stop Motion Animation