The last time I had a chance to sit down with First Boards Award winner PES, he mentioned he was keeping some bees in a freezer at his Harlem studio. The story of how they got there would take some time, so suffice to say that PES was excited about having them around, and cryptically revealed he had big plans for them.

His penchant for found items is what has vaulted him in less than a year from clever, low-cost, highly inventive spec spots (like Nike "Wild Horses Redux" and "Beasty Boy") to a million-dollar budget on a Bacardi campaign through davidandgoliath airing this month.

Though his first paying commercial gig was a spot last March for the LA Dodgers featuring a family of bobbleheads, he considers an early film about horny chairs ("Roof Sex") his breakthrough. "I had to find a new way to think in order to make it. I knew nothing about animation. I began conducting tests with doll furniture on my kitchen table, and I studied films of the old masters frame-by frame." His film "Kaboom!" (Boards, Sept. 2004), which he contributed to last year's Diesel Dreams short film project, has further increased his profile.

PES's style has developed through experimentation. "I discovered a chamber in my own brain that had literally hundreds of ideas. I've really just started making them. I think it was Steinbeck who said, 'Ideas are like rabbits. First you have one then you have a hundred'."

He's been collecting ideas, as well as stuff, for a long time. If you ask the New Jersey native if he always knew he wanted to be a filmmaker, he says, "I wanted to be a kid when I grew up. I still do." But then he remembers buying a Bolex and a projector at an early age and turning his bedroom into a theater.

"PES tells a story as good as anyone I know," says Steven Shore, EP of Czar.US, recalling why he signed him. "And I don't limit that to animation." While Shore observes that stop motion seems to come into vogue every five or six years, he also has a theory on why PES's unique style is in such demand right now. "Most stop motion has always been character based. PES's stop motion is object based," he says. "What people are seeing is how he uses found objects in a metaphorical way. What advertising is doing is seeing they can deconstruct their product a little bit, and then have PES make magic with those deconstructed elements."

That's exactly what he did in "Shoe", a fun spot for Coinstar, where spare change gathers from all corners of an apartment to form a high-heel shoe. Shot on 35mm, with several cameras shooting several sets at once, PES used multiple animators over four days.

"The battle scene shot with 1,000 coins racing toward the table took four hours, and we used every frame of it," he recalls. "I don't shoot much fat. In animation it is too costly to shoot film you won't use. This is one of the reasons I stay involved through the editing. I have to put the jigsaw puzzle together."

The most recent Bacardi shoot was the most challenging jigsaw puzzle he's faced yet. "This is like a stop motion tour de force," says Shore. Shot over eight days, it required three stages, going simultaneously, in the massive GMT studios in Culver City. However, it wasn't just the production, which boasted the design team from Team America: World Police and Eric Adkins, the DP from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, that impressed Shore. It was watching how his director handled the scope and scale of it all.

"There's always a proud moment when you watch them marshalling their first big production. But this was exceptional. This was, in my mind, kind of like that chess that Spock used to play on Star Trek with the three levels."

As long as he keeps producing those rabbits, the future looks like whatever PES chooses to make it. His European rep, Independent, is in talks with a seriously large brand in England that would continue his remarkable stop motion run. But Shore is quick to point out something, lest his director be pigeonholed. "Michel Gondry was a stop motion animator. That's not what he's doing any more."

And what ever happened to those poor bees PES had in his freezer? I finally got to ask. "I ate them for breakfast this morning," he replied simply.

YOUR FIRST...
...Computer? TRS-80
...Favorite Video Game? Commando for the Commodore 64
...Pet? A male poodle named Monsieur Muffee
...R-Rated Movie? The Creepshow at a drive-in theater in NJ
...Drug trip? Mushrooms and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm wraparound
...Job? I bred rabbits as a 10 year old. I once collected rabbit poop and served it to my brother as Cocoa Puffs.
...memory? Lining up all my toy cars along the wall and pushing the last one to make all of them move. It didn't work that well. Animation turned out to be a better solution.
...favorite disaster? Mt. Saint Helens (my grandmother took me to walk on the river of ash in Oregon).
...sexual discovery? I discovered the word 'Vulva' in the dictionary.
...witnessed death? Some guy committed suicide by jumping off the upper deck at Yankee Stadium.

PES> http://www.eatpes.com
Czar> http://www.czar.com
Independent> http://www.independ.net