• Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel resident, will have his short films shown at the weekly Bethel film festival. Photo Tuesday, May 15, 2018. Photo: Carol Kaliff / Hearst Connecticut Media / The News-Times
Photo: Carol Kaliff / Hearst Connecticut Media
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Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel resident, will have his short films shown at the weekly Bethel film festival. Photo Tuesday, May 15, 2018.
Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel resident, will have his short films shown at the weekly Bethel film festival. Photo Tuesday, May 15, 2018.
Photo: Carol Kaliff / Hearst Connecticut Media
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Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel resident, will have his short films shown at the weekly Bethel film festival. Photo Tuesday, May 15, 2018.
Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel resident, will have his short films shown at the weekly Bethel film festival. Photo Tuesday, May 15, 2018.
Photo: Carol Kaliff / Hearst Connecticut Media
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Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel resident, will have his short films shown at the weekly Bethel film festival. Photo Tuesday, May 15, 2018.
Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel resident, will have his short films shown at the weekly Bethel film festival. Photo Tuesday, May 15, 2018.
Photo: Carol Kaliff / Hearst Connecticut Media
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Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel filmmaker, created the clay puppets for his short “Jasper in a Jam,” which will be shown at 7 p.m. Wednesday as part of FilmFest52 at Bethel Cinema. The character of Jasper is on the left. less
Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel filmmaker, created the clay puppets for his short “Jasper in a Jam,” which will be shown at 7 p.m. Wednesday as part of FilmFest52 at Bethel Cinema. The character of ... more
Photo: Contributed Photo / Hearst Connecticut Media
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Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel filmmaker, will premiere his short, “Jasper in a Jam,” at 7 p.m. Wednesday as part of FilmFest52 at Bethel Cinema.
Lorenzo Leite, a 16-year-old Bethel filmmaker, will premiere his short, “Jasper in a Jam,” at 7 p.m. Wednesday as part of FilmFest52 at Bethel Cinema.
Photo: Contributed Photo / Hearst Connecticut Media
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BETHEL — Lorenzo Leite fell in love with filmmaking when he was just 6 years old, after he saw the stop-motion work of some family friends and became mesmerized by the clay characters. He then watched “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” a popular animated movie from Tim Burton and Henry Selick, three times in a row.

“That was when I knew this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” said Leite, a now 16-year-old Bethel resident.

Leite has gone on to make dozens of Lego animation and claymation films, many of which are available on YouTube.

But his eight-minute movie, “Jasper in a Jam,” will premiere at the Bethel Cinema at 7 p.m. Wednesday, alongside 11 other local filmmakers as part of the weekly FilmFest52.

Tom Carruthers, who founded FilmFest52, said Leite’s film impressed him.

“My hat goes off to it,” Carruthers said. “I saw it from the very beginning and l loved it. This guy really put his heart and soul into making it.”

This week’s FilmFest52 also features shorts from Bethel, Danbury, Southbury, Norwalk, Oxford, Old Saybrook, Greenwich, Middletown and Newington. The film festival runs each Wednesday and showcases “world class, independent films,” Carruthers said.

“There aren't a lot of weekly film festivals going on in the United States or the world,” he said. “It's a unique opportunity to see content people wouldn’t ordinarily be able to see.”

Leite’s family friends gave him a brief introduction to stop-motion filmmaking, but he has learned almost everything on his own by watching classic stop-motion movies and studying the experts, such as his idol Will Vinton, who revolutionized claymation, and George Pal, an animator popular in the 1930s and 1940s.

The short that will be shown at FilmFest52 is a remake of Pal’s 1940s “Jasper in a Jam.” The film tells the story of Jasper, who gets locked in a store in the rain when suddenly various instruments come to life and serenade him.

“Jasper in a Jam” took Leite about a month and a half to complete, including the time to create the clay puppets and to film in his grandparents’ garage in Bethel. For “Jasper,” Leite also had to make his most challenging puppet yet, a 1 1/2-foot totem pole with intricate faces.

He enjoys both creating the puppets — it reminds him of using Play-Doh as a child — and filming the shorts.

“I love the process of stop motion, immersing yourself in the world,” Leite said.

Leite is homeschooled, so he said that has given him more time to invest in his stop motion. His dream would be to go to the film school where Will Vinton teaches and then open a film business in Bethel.

Leite’s YouTube channel, Klay-Kremling , has a total of 70 million views and 2,620 subscribers. At one point, when Leite frequently created lego animations for the channel, he said he earned between $1,000 to $3,000 a month from YouTube.

Leite has since focused on improving his claymation skills.

“Legos are fun, but clay is what I always wanted to invest in,” he said.

He started making stop-motion films at five frames per second, but has transitioned to 24 frames per second, which is more traditional.

The amount of time it takes to complete one second of the film varies depending on how complicated a character’s movement is, Leite said. Adjusting an arm is easier than attaching a new mouth to the puppet when the character talks.

Some days Leite spends 12 hours in the studio, but only finishes one scene. But he said he gets so absorbed he doesn’t realize how long he has been working.

“Once you’re into it, time all around you flies by," Leite said.

Most people say claymation requires patience, and Leite said that’s true.

But it also requires something else.

“It’s about the obsession you have for it,” he said.