Xerxes, the beloved baby Asian elephant born at the Oklahoma City Zoo this past July, lives just 5 miles southeast of an even smaller elephant. Xerxes’ counterpart is made of felt and sits in a snowy scene at Loud Cloud Animation Studio. He waits for animators to delicately adjust his position as they create a winter-themed stop-motion advertisement for the Zoo.
“This has probably taken an hour so far,” said Mason Drumm, the founder and creative director of Loud Cloud Animation Studio. He points to the screen hanging over the crafted scene, which shows a seconds-long clip of miniature Xerxes playfully moving his head. “I’m only about 30 frames in, and that’s pretty fast.”
Loud Cloud is an Oklahoma City-based animation studio specializing in stop-motion storytelling. Adapting to their increasing demand, the group moved to a bigger space last month. The new workshop is populated with scenes from current projects and includes well-ventilated spaces to accommodate safe woodworking, spray painting and plaster pouring practices.
Drumm originally fell in love with stop-motion animation while working in the marketing department at the University of Oklahoma, where he would occasionally be asked to make stop-motion videos for social media. “In making those videos, I got to work with my hands, do photography and tell stories. I realized that stop-motion was this mix of all these things that I really love.” Drumm started pursuing stop-motion projects in his free time, turning his garage into a makeshift studio.
Fast forward a decade, Drumm now works full-time as an animator at a stop-motion studio in his hometown. “This is a dream,” he smiled. “I love that we have an animation studio here in Oklahoma City.”
Loud Cloud is not only the sole stop-motion animation studio in Oklahoma City, it is the only one in the Midwest. While individual animators work throughout the region, Loud Cloud is currently the only studio that consistently facilitates large, big-budget projects aligned with industry standards.
With stop-motion studios mostly concentrated in Los Angeles and Portland, Loud Cloud’s base in central Oklahoma is certainly unusual. Throughout the first month of being in the new space, Loud Cloud’s fabrication lead, Josie Howe, could be seen painting “Made In Oklahoma” across one of the studio’s main walls. “Being in Oklahoma is the reason that we’re able to have an animation studio,” said Drumm, proudly. “There’s no way we would have been able to grow to this point––or be able to afford a space like this––on the West Coast.”
Since their founding, Loud Cloud has animated videos for the Oklahoma Tourism Department and Tobacco Stops With Me, created a Super Bowl ad for Crowson Law Group in Alaska and produced social media content for companies like LEGO, YETI, Mortal Kombat and Campbell’s Soup. One of their biggest projects thus far was a 90-second film titled “Love Next Door” for title.com, which was commissioned by Fidelity National Financial.
For those, like me, who may be wondering: What does it take to create a stop-motion animation video?
Shorter videos, like the one for the Oklahoma City Zoo, might only require 2 or 3 people and 1 week of work.
On the other hand, “Love Next Door” took 25 people––not including those who worked with Finch Digital, an Edmond-based company that helped develop the project––and months of work. “We had everything from set fabricators, prop fabricators, storyboard artists and graphic designers to a colorist, production manager, lead animator and art director,” Drumm said. They also flew in acclaimed and award-winning animators like Justin Rasch, Lindsay Berkebile and Sarah de Gaudemar to help with the process. The entire operation was enough to fill a 64-page process book post-production.
From collaborative narrative creation to custom puppet crafting to meticulous animation, stop-motion can be a laborious creative endeavor. A video that can be watched in less than a minute could have easily taken a multitude of days to create. “It’s crazy. I love it, but it’s crazy,” laughed Drumm. “It’s a very intensive process.”
While it may sound overwhelming to some, it is precisely this intensity that makes stop-motion animation enticing for Loud Cloud’s clients. “They come to us because they want to really differentiate themselves and they’re willing to spend money on telling stories that are inherently handcrafted and, therefore, implicitly human,” Drumm said.
Even if the proliferation of AI-generated videos on social media paints a negative picture about the future of smaller animation studios, a movement within the animation world is centering the work of smaller, more innovative studios. For example, the winner of the 2025 Best Animated Feature Oscar, “Flow,” was a film made by Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis using free animation software and a budget of $4 million. It beat out “Inside Out 2,” which had a budget of $200 million, and “The Wild Robot,” which had a budget of $78 million.
The notion of “implicitly human” is a throughline of Loud Cloud’s work. And, it is something that grounds the studio as AI grows more rampant in the worlds of art and animation. “I think the pendulum is gonna swing as AI becomes more prevalent,” said Drumm, highlighting that human-made art will become more novel with the rise of AI. “While I believe that AI will eventually be able to make something that looks like stop-motion, that doesn’t change the fact that clients want things made by humans. They want to be able to say, ‘Hey, there were 25 people that put their heart and soul into this.’ And, stop motion is just a really great way to do that.”
“The industry is shifting,” said Drumm. “The mindset is turning into, ‘How can we tell stories for cheaper?’ That’s not targeted at not paying people fairly, but rather the idea that there are creative people that can do more with less. Even though stop motion categorically is more expensive than other mediums, because we’re in Oklahoma and because the tide is shifting in our favor, I think we’ll be able to be a bigger player in telling stories that get more acclaim and recognition.”
Beyond evolution within the animation industry, growth here in Oklahoma––from winning the 2025 NBA championships to hosting Olympic events in 2028––is enough to fuel excitement. “I want to be part of the momentum that’s happening here,” Drumm said. “I’m trying to be intentional about doing an animated feature, which would be the ultimate dream for our studio. It would mean providing a lot of jobs for creatives in Oklahoma and flying in really great animators to influence other artists here.”
Beyond future aspirations, Loud Cloud currently represents another, more present sort of growth. Creating a thriving space for animators, and artists more broadly, to flourish in the Great Plains is an accomplishment that should not be overlooked. Oklahoma City should be very excited to see how Loud Cloud Animation Studio expands the city’s artistic frontiers.
For those who want to keep an eye out for Loud Cloud’s work, you can find them at www.loudcloudanimation.com or @loudcloud_animation on Instagram.