Pigeon Pilfer from Michael Stevenson on Vimeo.

Pigeon Pilfer is a beautifully animated stop-motion film from Michael Stevenson. It is his senior film as a student at San Francisco State University. It took him four months to complete and involved sixty pounds of clay. It was shot with a Canon DSLR using Dragon Stop Motion animation software.

Here are some stills from the film and a behind-the-scenes shot of Michael on the set:

We asked Michael if he wanted to share his thoughts about Dragon:

“Dragon is by far the most valuable tool in my stop motion toolbox. I began working on Pigeon Pilfer a few months before Dragon was released, so I tried out most of the available stop motion software on both Mac and Windows. I was so unhappy with it all that I attempted to program my own frame grabber.

“Thankfully Dragon came to save the day just one week before I started shooting. It’s the only software I’ve used that simply steps out of the way – it allows me to animate without being encumbered by a complex frame wrangling workflow. By the end of the shoot it was clear that Dragon had things well in hand—all of my captured frames were very clearly marked and sorted, immediately ready for post production. From start to finish, everything just worked.”

Check out the behind-the-scenes gallery on the Pigeon Pilfer website.