Wow, it's a quarter after three and I haven't even started my day yet. I've got the post-festival hangover and a general inclination to lounge about. I'm leaving in a moment, and have no particular desire to post-op the fest in blog form right now, but I thought I'd tell you a few things about the making of my movie this year, E-Watchamacallit Un-amation.
For whatever reasons that exist only in the mind of the creator, this is pretty much my favourite thing ever. Well, possibly not "ever," because it's not really fair to compare it to something that's, say, more than a minute long. Still, of the surprising glut of extremely-short-format films I've made in the past five years, including the three for the One Minute Film Festival, E-Watch has pretty much been my clear favourite from the moment I came up with it to the moment it hit the big screen last night. I fucking love this thing. Someone said to me a long time ago that a film (among other niceties of story, theme, expression, and craft) should satisfy one's whimsy and psychological eccentricities, and that's exactly what this one does for me, fairly perfectly.
I had been wanting to make an animated 1-minute movie since the 2003 festival, and last year's film, Leap, was intended to be digitally treated, Waking Life-style, as a halfway measure in this regard. The results of that process were unsatisfying, however, so Leap was left as it was shot, and when the "intersections" theme was announced for this year's festival, I began to puzzle out some animated concepts for my 2005 film. One, a moralistic ghost story titled Swept, actually had me all the way through the script and storyboard process and into the initial stages of visual research and animation before I folded it, for possible development a bit further down the road.
It's in fact true that I had been receiving cells from the Ewoks animated series at random intervals throughout 2004; during some pie-in-the-sky blogging back in April, I not only announced my intention to make an animated film out of these meaningless scraps of imagery, but to set the film to Esquivel's "Watchamacallit," a tune I had finally tracked down recently after hearing it used on a Letterman segment back in the '90s. I was largely bullshitting at the time, but when Swept fell apart, Un-amation quickly took over as my main concept, mostly because the combination of that song with an intersected vine/butterfly (the "vinerfly") appealed to me in the most ghastly, down-to-my-roots way. Putting those two "useless" scraps of Star Wars history together into a working, flying vinerfly has a little bit to say about the way serendipitous comings-together of seemingly unrelated elements helps bring out the magic in everyday life, and the way films themselves (and especially Star Wars for me) lets us see the mundane transform into the phenomenal. And suddenly, I have a movie to make that I'm already in love with.
I shot the framing sequences with Mark and I first, and then put in animatics for the scene of the vinerfly's flight. I slowly replaced those animatics with plate photography over the course of the summer. The only thing I didn't get to do with this movie was have a pair of nudists run through the corner of one of the plates; otherwise I gathered the background footage for the vinerfly's flight in and around my neighbourhood. My sister had asked to be in my one-minute movie this year, which was easily acommodated; the Taste of the Danforth gave me some boosted production value with its gigantic, street-consuming crowd. (The little girl who waved at my camera gave me an unexpected, but extremely satisfying, beat.)
Once all the elements were in place and the cut was finalized, I took my Ewoks cells, scanned them at high-res, and manipulated them in Photoshop until I had a workable, 9-frame repetitive animation cycle for the flight pattern. I then simply output this from ImageReady as an animated strip, looped it in Premiere so that I had about 30 seconds of video against a white background, and then drew the material into After Effects, where I composited it over the plates, manipulating shape, size, and brightness and contrast to seat it into the scene appropriately. For a process that I was expecting to take weeks of my time, I got most of the animation done in a single night. I finessed things a few weeks later, and called it a lock.
(I ended up doing the biggest last-minute cheat of my life this week, though, when I was forced to re-record the master tape for the show, and took it as an opportunity to also re-record my dialogue at the head of E-Watch, with which I'd been unsatisfied. I recorded ADR on the fly and ran it into the master five minutes later. The sync is a joke, but "animated" and "butterfly" hit their marks, and that's all that matters.)
And that's that. It's not the longest movie ever and certainly not the most complicated, but it's the first time I've felt like my one-minute movie was up with the best of the other one-minute movies we showed this year. Now all I have to do is figure out what to do next.
