Carter Rostron had already created seven film festival movies when he was looking for a project to do during the pandemic.
"I couldn't go out and meet with any of my friends or other actors," he recalls. "And so I had to find a medium that I could do by myself, in my room, just at home."
The result was the stop-motion film short "Ruth & Nick: A Confectionery Tale," which has been played at film festivals both domestically and abroad, including Australia, India, Brazil, and Ireland.
Citing "Romeo and Juliet" and filmmaker Chuck Jones' "The Dot and the Line" as his inspiration, Rostron based his plot on teen love: Nick is a nerd who falls in love with Ruth, a member of the popular crowd.
Using pieces of candy as his actors, Rostron cast a Nik-L-Nip and a mini Baby Ruth in the lead roles, then spent more than a month creating the sets and filming the scenes, a decimal at a time.
"Each scene could take a couple of days of work," Rostron explains.
When it came to the big ballroom scene, "that was by far the longest and the most complicated scene. It has so many moving pieces in it. And I think that scene itself took, maybe, four days of work."
At film festivals, "Ruth & Nick" has won several "Best of" awards along with honorable mentions.
Rostron says the feedback has "given me a lot of motivation to continue filmmaking in this field."
As for his future in the movies, Rostron says, "I would definitely be able to see myself doing something either behind the camera or in front of it."
