In an age increasingly saturated with AI-generated slop, there is something deeply refreshing about encountering a filmmaker who builds entire worlds by hand, telling stories frame by frame in clay.

Emma Jacqueline is a New Jersey-based filmmaker I stumbled upon a couple of months ago while scrolling TikTok, whose films are “dedicated to presenting fresh queer and female-focussed stories.” A multi-talent, Jacqueline is a writer, director, and actor. She also animates her own stop-motion films, which captivated me as soon as I found her page, and I knew from the moment I saw it that Emma Jacqueline is a rising star that should be on Obscurae readers’ radars. 

Jacqueline was kind enough to provide me with an early screener of her latest project, set to release later this year or in early 2027. Rise of the Dead: Grandmageddon follows two young, sapphic sweethearts named Megan and Kira who accidentally start an all-grandma zombie uprising after casting a spell-gone-wrong. 

Grandmageddon is a delight to behold. It’s fresh, funny, and impressively gory for claymation. It also happens to be a sorrowfully sweet coming-out story. 

Heavily influenced by The Nightmare Before Christmas as a child, Jacqueline has been experimenting with stop motion from a young age. At ten-years-old, Jacqueline was creating her own stop-motion videos using LEGO minifigures and sets inspired by other young animators uploading their work to YouTube in the early 2010s.

“I watched [amateur LEGO stop motion videos] religiously as a kid and thought, ‘wow, I want to do that too.’”

What began as experimentation evolved into a more traditional claymation practice, with Jacqueline pivoting toward claymation in 2023.

Part of the appeal of stop motion, she explains, lies in the autonomy it affords. Unlike many forms of filmmaking that require large crews, complicated logistics, and a considerable amount of luck to get projects off the ground, stop-motion allows Jacqueline to create projects on her own terms. 

Like many independent artists working in niche media, bringing Grandmageddon to life required a combination of community support and creative problem-solving. After completing the script, Jacqueline launched a Kickstarter campaign to help finance production in October 2025. Rather than stretching resources thin across every element of the film, she made a strategic decision to invest heavily in the areas she felt mattered most: securing voice actors and commissioning highly expressive lead-character puppets from artists AJ Dubler and Carmela Murphy.

The resulting aesthetic emerged as much from practical necessity as artistic intention. While the lead characters were rendered with remarkable detail, many of the supporting props and creatures were intentionally minimalist and handmade by Jacqueline. “I saw it as Kira and Megan inhabiting a liminal, dreamlike world rooted in the film's themes of grief and memory,” she shared. 

One of the more striking aspects of the production is how much of the work was completed by the filmmaker herself. While principal photography took roughly a month of near-daily animation, the vast majority of the production timeline was spent preparing for that moment. 

Stop-motion is often described as a medium that rewards patience, and here that patience is evident in every frame, every fingerprint etched into clay, and some incredibly impressive orbit shots. In an era increasingly defined by AI and our resistance against it, Grandmageddon stands out as a beautiful, handmade wonder in independent cinema. 

The trailer for Rise of the Dead: Grandmageddon is available here! Check it out here and make sure to follow Emma Jacqueline for more updates, behind-the-scenes, and clips from her upcoming projects on her channels: 

Instagram: @emma_jacqueline_

TikTok: @emmajacquelinefilm 

YouTube: C Cup Cinema