Darcy Prendergast is a 21 year old clay animator from Melbourne Australia. At 21, he has already achieved international success with his animated films, and continues to push the boundaries of the medium with the aid of iStopMotion.

"I love dividing an audience. Its something I deliberately set out to do and the further I take my gags, the bigger the audience reaction."

And pushing the boundaries is something his new film is definitely going to do.

"Its called Ron The Zookeeper, it's about Ron and a very rare grey panda named Sushi. Sushi is the last male grey panda left in the entire world, and Ron is sent in to retrieve a sperm sample, to pull this species off the brink of extinction. One problem, Sushi is impotent. I will leave the rest to your imagination."

And this imagination of Darcy's continues to make his films a stand out at film festivals world wide. But how does one make an animated film of this nature?

"I am not going to lie to you, it is a long process. You really do need a lot of patience and a strong attention to detail. My last film "Off The Rails" took 2 years to make, to give an indication of the time frame, and that was a 6 minute film! You really must have that passion to create. That said, at the end of the production, you have a film your immensely proud of, and that hard work pays off.
Luckily programs like iStopMotion make the production process a lot easier, and more exact. When I was filming "Off The Rails" a lot was left up to guess work. If I accidentally knocked a character, then the shot was ruined. With the onion skinning feature in iStopMotion however, you can often re-position the character back to the same pose, and not have to scrap a days worth of animation.
It's also a handy reference when animating. You can see how much your moving the characters hand every time, which enables you to produce a much smoother final result.
iStopMotion is on the same level as sliced bread, or the invention of television - to an animator at least."