Watch Daniel Sterlin-Altman’s stop-motion short about a teenage boy secretly writing explicit gay erotica while his single mom is being seduced by a carrot.
Daniel Sterlin-Altman has shared with AWN the release of his stop-motion short, Carrotica, now online after an incredibly successful two-year festival run. Since its premiere, Carrotica has won the Cristal for Best Graduation Film at Annecy 2024, among other awards. AWN previously profiled Sterlin-Altman's 2018 film, Reach the Sky.
Carrotica tells the story of a teenage boy secretly writing explicit gay erotica in his bedroom while his recently single mother becomes increasingly seduced by a carrot. Through these parallel narratives, the film explores loneliness, desire, and emotional survival with humor and vulnerability.
Created over four years, including an 11-month stop-motion shoot, the film used eight handmade foam-latex puppets with replacement faces, 10 handcrafted miniature sets, and a range of practical in-camera effects. Enjoy the film, along with some BTS images below:
Sterlin-Altman shared with AWN that the film was shot frame-by-frame in 4:3 at 2K resolution and runs 13 minutes. Every frame was animated by hand using puppets constructed from foam latex with ball-and-socket armatures, replacement mouth pieces, and button eyes to convey emotion.
"In terms of getting it made, a big challenge was convincing producers that this story would resonate with wide audiences, and that the triple narrative would be understandable," Sterlin-Altman says. "There was a fear that the explicit gay aspect would alienate certain audiences. There was also fear that having several protagonists would be confusing. As a result, I ended up making this at the university so I could do it on my terms."
"For the animation nerds, the construction was an absurd challenge to undertake for a graduation film," he continues. "The 10 miniature sets were built by me and a dedicated team of other unpaid students from across different arts programs in Berlin, who generously offered a couple days of their week to churn out these sets over 8 months. We built the sets in my 7m2 (75 square foot) studio in Berlin while the shoot was already happening, and when a couple sets more were ready we transferred them to the basement of the university where I was animating to make room for the next sets. Production and design had to be arranged to adapt to these space limitations."
Regarding the film's music. Sterlin-Altman initially intended to include an Edith Piaf song but found licensing costs prohibitive. "So, I ended up crafting a song myself and later had the idea to make use of the university resources to ask the talented composition student, Felix Gayed, to arrange my improvised singing performance into a full orchestrated piece, to codify this song into the realities of the queer iconography of the film," Sterlin-Altman reveals. "And the American Edith Piaf of this world ended up being Swedish music artist Adrienne Lewenhaupt (EnnE), which is played during the credits (my favourite part of the film)."
Sterlin-Altman is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary filmmaker working across animation and moving image. His work blends tactile visual worlds, emotional vulnerability, and absurdity to explore intimacy, longing, and social tension. His films have earned awards including the Cristal at Annecy Festival, the Golden Horseman Award at Filmfest Dresden, and Best Student Film at Animafest Zagreb.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
