In any family, competition amongst siblings can be heavy. It can be especially so when all the kids are creatively inclined. Witness the Salters family: "My oldest brother makes documentaries, the next one is a musician [General Elektriks, Blackalicious] and the next is a writer. I spent most of my childhood trying to impress the three of them," admits 28-year-old Arno Salters dryly from his base in Paris.

Artistic drive firmly instilled, his course choice at London School of Economics might seem rather odd: the knotty and distinctly unartistic Political Theory and Russian. "I spent most of my time there working with the drama society putting on plays," he admits.

Fixated by the stage and screen he moved to San Francisco to study at the Academy of Art, where he started experimenting, making a kookily detailed and inventive stop-motion video for his brother's band General Electriks. His motivation, he admits, was more monetary than aesthetic. "The main reason I started doing stop motion is the shoestring budgets," he says.

More neatly-crafted music videos for Honeycut and Golden Dogs followed, and in early 2006 he was spotted and snapped up by Toronto-based Spy Films. He's been keen to break out from the animation pigeon-hole, though. "The biggest obstacle to directors in this industry is getting labeled," he says. "Just as I was starting in this industry producers were trying to label me as a stop-motion guy and I fought really hard not to be that."

His early theatrical leaning has served him well in that fight. He's shot an in-camera Seb Martel music video that featured the band's hands, heads and instruments playing in isolated boxes. A literal realization of the behind-the-scenes workings of an internet provider for Canadian cable company Shaw through BBDO, Toronto, mixed retro-styling and inventive art direction. He's also recently completed a neat moving-sets number for French supermarket Leclerc through French production company Nose PH (part of Première Heure).

"I always like to have a homemade approach," he offers. "That's pretty obvious with stop motion because you're literally doing things by hand, but then that translates into the theatrical with the set design.

"I like to get as much as possible in-camera. I always fight producers who tell me CG is cheaper and the way to go," he continues. "I find that if you do things by hand there's an imperfection that has a lot of charm."

Spy Films http://www.spyfilms.com
Premère Heure http://www.premiere-heure.ph