Permanent Collection

Stefan Klauss Explores Pure Motion in “KEYFRAMES” Short Film

Posted on Wednesday, December 3, 2025

Berlin-based veteran creature/character animator Stefan Klauss (whose feature credits include Avengers, The Jungle Book and Fantastic Beasts) just dropped us his new short film, a study in “pure motion” called KEYFRAMES.

Stefan Klauss: “The idea for this film was more about vibe than traditional storytelling. I was fascinated by action sports like parkour — watching athletes move through their environment without narrative, just pure motion.

“The biggest challenge was doing everything myself and pushing it to a point where I felt ready to release it. In the end since it was a one man project and I wasn’t able to bring Daft Punk out of retirement, I decided to do the music too, even though I am not a musician and never will be.

“I was fascinated by action sports like parkour — watching athletes move through their environment without narrative, just pure motion.”

“Overall, the short was more of a creative and mental challenge than a technical one. I started this piece after I left [Framestore] in London and it was a challenge to keep going and improving and incrementing. I really just wanted to see what I could come up with on my own and have full creative control.

“In terms of technical challenges, the biggest was probably creating the bigger tile patches where I used Bifrost Graph, a plugin that ships with Maya. It is a visual programming environment for proceduralism and FX. Essentially you can create your own compounds (groups of nodes) and connect them up, so you can create pretty much anything.

“The character was rigged with an auto-rigging tool named Advanced Skeleton, which is free for non commercial, personal, and indie projects. The BMX bike and the skateboard I rigged myself. All shots are fully hand-keyframed, no mocap etc.”