The Oscar-winning ‘Harvie Krumpet’ director discusses how he’s failed as a filmmaker if audiences aren’t left emotionally wrecked by his latest film about the difficult lives of once inseparable twins forced to live with different families after their father dies; just nominated for an Oscar and two Annie Awards.
Taking advantage of the downtime caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot got busy mapping out his sophomore stop-motion animated feature film, , by creating 1,600 storyboard panels, designing 200 characters and sets, and conceptualizing 5,000 to 7,000 props.The film, nominated for an Oscar and two Annie Awards, and winner of an Annecy Cristal this past summer, revolves around twins Grace and Gilbert, who are inseparable until their father dies and they are sent away by child services to live with different families.
While the siblings dream of being reunited, they experience the pains of growing up, with one becoming a hoarder of snail memorabilia and the other developing a fascination with fire.As with his feature film directorial debut, , released in 2009, as well as his shorts, including 2004 Oscar winner , a signature element of the storytelling is the use of voiceover narration.“My whole 28-year career in stop-motion has had to rely on voiceovers because my budgets are low,” notes Elliot, who wrote, directed, produced, and handled production design on .
“It’s so much more economical to get a narrator to drive the story, but I’m also mindful of the rule ‘show it, don’t say it.’ We’re always paring back the dialogue wherever possible, and it’s a process of distillation to get as little dialogue in the film as possible, as little voiceover so it becomes as visual as possible.That is tricky.” “Stop-motion is a prescribed art form, so every storyboard panel was turned into an animated shot,” he continues.“The editor, Bill Murphy, didn’t have a lot to play with and cut about eight minutes out of the film.
There was a scene where Grace joins a Canberra Cheese Fan Society, which went for about 20 seconds, but that got cut out.Everything else that was shot ended up in the film.It was trimming each shot.” Showcasing all the film’s props is the opening title sequence.
“There is only one bit of animation, and that’s the toilet seat falling,” he explains.“It’s all the genius of our cinematographer, Gerald Thompson, because that is one continuous robotic move.It was an old robot that was used to build cars in a car factory, and he reengineered it to be able to move a frame at a time, and then he put a long snorkel lens on the end of it.
It took him two weeks to experiment and plan that move without a single cut.It’s my Martin Scorsese moment! It took us two weeks to set up as well.In all, about a month.
Very challenging.We had some strobing issues that we had to fix in post.There were days when we felt that it wasn’t going to work.
It was too ambitious.” Then there was the shot of the burning church.“Too ambitious,” laughs Elliot.“John Lewis [animation supervisor] was the mastermind behind getting that to work.
Originally, we were going to stick the yellow cellophane on the actual building, but it was too difficult.We decided to do it on greenscreen and comp it in.But even just animating the flames required lots of experimentation.
The dynamics of a flame moving… it’s asymmetrical, erratic, not consistent, and it flares.Fire is probably in the top 10 things to avoid.Don’t ever make fire!” Then Gilbert goes out in the middle of a busy road to save a snail.
“That was a real collaboration between the cinematographer, animation supervisor, various animators, and our editor, who had to put all of that together,” Elliot shares.“That was probably the most challenging for Bill because he had to give that sequence a fast pace and make it feel dangerous.Bill deviated from the storyboards a little bit actually to make it work.
Some of the shots were a bit slow.Gilbert didn’t look as stressed as he should have, so a couple of retakes were needed.The cars were all done against greenscreen, then comped in.
I’ve never done action sequences like this one or the church burning down.Those two sequences were probably the most technically challenging apart from the opening shot.The whole film was technically challenging!” In another move driven by economics, costumes were painted onto the puppets.
“It was sad to have to abandon fabric, and it was a hard decision, but it saved a lot of time,” states Elliot.“Actually, it forced the sculptors to be more inventive and to add a lot of texture to the clay and paint on some fabric as well.It turned out well.
I was worried it would lessen the production design.It was something that would be sadly missed, but no one ever brought it up.I will continue going down that path.
It’s not good for my poor old costume designer who missed out on a job, but we found jobs for them doing other things like making props.The curtains and couches were fabricated with paint and paper.We discovered that if you screw a piece of paper into a ball, unscrew it, and screw it up again 10 times, it takes on this fabric look anyway.” The character that went through the most iterations was Pinky, Grace’s elderly mentor.
According to Elliot, “She’s a dynamic puppet, and her hair was a challenge, her glasses, and her mouth.Pinky had the most mouth shapes, and Alexander Esenarro Santafe, our sculptor, did half a dozen head iterations.Also, she ages, so that was tricky.
Grace had a lot of iterations as well, but her design was a lot more simplistic.” One well-known Oscar-winning film had a tremendous impact on the color palette, with red used as a narrative highlight.“I stole that off of Steven Spielberg from ,” chuckles Elliot.“I love using spot color as a way of heightening and emphasizing certain important objects.
On , I did the same thing.This film is a lot warmer.It’s more saturated. was much more desaturated, and part of the film was black and white.
This film has a lot of browns, but the 1970s were brown in Australia.A lot of people painted their houses brown.It also matched the psychological states of Grace and Gilbert.
Melbourne is much more blacky brown, Canberra is a beige vanilla brown, and Perth is a horrific brown.They each have their own distinct palette, but we were restrictive on how many colors were used in the film.Blue and green were banned.
There is a little bit of pink, not much.But lots of red and orange.” One of the film’s funniest moments involves Grace and Gilbert’s facial expressions as they witness two snails copulating inside a glass bottle.“Poor Nelson Dean, our animator, he struggled and had a couple of goes at the snail mating,” recalls Elliot.
“We didn’t know what we wanted.We Googled snails mating, and oh, my god, it’s horrific! We did two versions.There were snails with lots of juice coming out, and that’s the one we went with.
But there was a cleaner version too.They were gentler on each other.But we wanted Gilbert and Grace to be as shocked as the audience about what they were seeing.
We had a lot of fun with those sorts of scenes.The orgy.Pinky tap dancing.
Then, of course, there are sequences that are more alarming and horrifying, like Gilbert’s gay conversion therapy.It was a real mixed bag of challenging sequences.We’re not only challenging the audience, but it was challenging for us to actually animate.” Built into the design of the puppets are Grace and Gilbert’s character arcs.
“There are multiple versions of the puppets that change throughout the film, so the sculpt and the puppet itself are already addressing a lot of that storytelling,” observes John Lewis, animation supervisor.“Then we also have Sarah Snook’s voice, which acts as a guide [for Grace].We largely improvise the performance based on what we’re hearing frame by frame.
We don’t sit down and plan out every little nuanced movement because when you’re animating the voice, the puppet wants to do things.You know you’ve got it right when it feels like the voice is coming from the puppet.Lip sync, tiny gestures, and even character blinks, it can all be cued by the actor’s vocal performance.” Three puppets were made for each of the main characters so they could be shot on multiple sets simultaneously.
“Because of the lack of fabric and silicone in the bodies, the puppets couldn’t sit down,” remarks Lewis.“We had to have another version of the character if we wanted it to sit down.And the characters also age throughout the script; we have child, teenage, and adult versions.
Grace’s weight changes.There are lots of different versions of the same character to get around those restrictions as well as to serve the story.Many of those characters are simple.
They’re background characters, almost like statues that blink.We restricted their complexity.We had seven stages shooting at any one time out of nine available.” Lewis also animated on .
“In many ways, there’s not much difference because we used Stop Motion Pro on , and now we’re using Dragonframe,” he describes.“We did need a certain amount of compositing.The big difference between the two films is there’s a smaller budget on , and Adam has matured as a filmmaker and knows what he wants.
We were able to push it much more towards the personal style that he prefers, rather than someone else’s style like Aardman.The smaller budget resulted in different solutions.The puppets were less complicated but, in many ways, more interesting.
We avoided newer technologies like 3D printing.We didn’t use any 3D printing for the puppets because that’s not the kind of film Adam wants to make.We wanted a handmade film.
All the effects were done in-camera.Adam has a list of rules that he wanted to follow, and we followed them.” Vehicles were animated as well.“They were beautifully built, though for many, we only built half a vehicle,” reveals Lewis.
“The vehicles were made out of wood with sculpting over the top to increase their weight.But they all worked, and we pushed them around quite a bit.If we needed a character to sit in one, they were specifically designed to handle that.
The roofs would come off.The other non-character animation we did was the effects work.Fire used cellophane, and smoke used cotton wool.
Everything was animated on the under-camera rig [which allowed the camera to swing down onto a glass tabletop].There were a lot of effects.Anytime an animator had some downtime, they were on the visual effects stage picking up some of those shots.” Other key scenes range from the naturalism of Grace sitting on a bench to a surrealistic representation of her in the womb with Gilbert.
“Both take different styles of animation and are enjoyable to do in their own way,” Lewis shares.“Different animators lend themselves to different styles.One does more naturalistic acting where you imagine a character is a real person, while one pushes things much further for a comedic slapstick scene.
Even though sitting on a bench doesn’t seem exciting, it’s satisfying as an animator to get the puppet to emote realistically.” When about animating an already slow-moving snail, such as Sylvia, climbing up a post, Lewis says, “It is a hard slog! We show a couple of different size scales.Sometimes we used a tiny blob of plasticine that you can barely tell has moved.When Sylvia heads up the post, we used a rig to help support and move her up nicely and slowly.
But the animator must employ a lot of patience to get move the snails slowly enough.” Despite his film’s dark undertone, Elliot is no nihilist.“They’re bittersweet to make and look at.I always say that if you’re not an emotional wreck by the end of one of my films, then I’ve failed as a writer.
You have to be exhausted by one of my films.I want to push every emotional button.Isn’t there a saying that goes, ‘I’ve suffered for my art.
Now it’s your turn.’ But at the same time, I don’t want the audience to be depressed.I want them to leave the cinema feeling uplifted and with a little bit of hope.It’s tricky to get that balance right.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for , , and .
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