Making a Rock to Roll.

Recently I looked through the notes from our two test screening feedback sessions and one note struck me as immensely important: 2 audience members didn’t feel connected to the main character right off the bat, so when she launches on her long tirade at the very beginning of the film, they just shrug their shoulders.

I know it was only 2 people out of 60, but the note made perfect sense to me. Too many times I have made the same complaint against other films, indie or Hollywood: don’t throw your character into a shower with the killer lurking unless you have made me to feel for the character. Or, at least for the killer.

The problem I was facing now was classic – how to make audience care or identify with a character in 40 seconds? Because that’s all I had – 40 seconds for opening credits that I could turn into a scene representing our main character’s predicament.

After a brief brain storm with the script’s adviser Sturgis Warner an image flashed through my electrified brain: a tiny woman pushing a huge rock up a mountain. Sturgis agreed: everyone could identify with that image – about life or work, we all feel that we are pushing a humongous rock up a mountain.

Quickly, before it evaporated, I sketched the idea on  scrap of paper. Like this:

- I’ll build the mountain and 2 rocks from paper mache. – I stated. – One rock will be at the bottom of the mountain, the other will be pushed up by our character. We’ll make the rock roll up the mountain in stop motion with the help of museum wax.

I had heard about museum wax (do not confuse it with wax museum!) from my stop motion friends, but have never seen nor touched it. It was easy to order it from Amazon, and it arrived in 6 days.

While waiting for museum wax, I started to work on the paper mache set. Just glue and old New York Times can make rocks and mountains:

Then painted over the paper mache with black acrylic paint:

Then painted it in color:

When the set was ready, the museum wax arrived and we discovered that no amount of it was big or strong enough to hold the paper mache rock on top of the mountain. Rolling the rock down in stop motion with the help of wax was out of question. Gravity had too much pull and wax just wouldn’t stick to paper mache.

Sturgis Warner, the film’s lighting designer and stop motion animator, suggested different solutions to the problem.

- You could draw the rock, – he said at some point.

But I had a very clear image in my head, from that brief electric brain flash 10 days before. The rock HAD to be three dimensional and in stop motion for the hand drawn two dimensional character to push it up the three dimensional slope.

Sturgis was losing patience with me when he came up with brilliant solution:

- Lets turn the end of the mountain up and tilt the camera. That way we wont have to fight gravity.

So we did that:

But even then the museum wax would not reliably hold the rock.

- If I only could hold it with my finger from the top! – Sturgis said. – Wait. A finger!

He walked away and came back carrying a long stick with a long nail attached at the end.

- Lets try this.

It worked:

We shot the rock rolling down the slope, and I put it in After Effects in opposite order to make it go up:

Sc. 001A test 3

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Then in Photoshop I erased the stick and stamped out the nail, adjusted the timing to the character’s efforts and now we had a clean rolling rock:

Sc. 001A on 4s

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The stop motion sequence is ready for the animated character to enter action.

Stay tuned!

39 Months of Gestation: Dark Place.

They say that longer gestation in animals is correlated with more intelligence. Elephants gestate 24 months, sperm whales and dolphins up to 19, walruses – 16.

So far “Rocks In My Pockets” has gestated 39 months. I don’t know about it’s intelligence, but as it’s mother I feel depleted of nutrition and deprived of social joys.

While everybody seems to having a party, I have sunk deeper in the hole I had dug for myself 39 months ago.

- Can we get together? – a friend asks.

- Sure!- I say, because I love my friends.

- When?

I look in my calendar and I see nothing but work work work on the schedule every day.

- Uhm, this month is busy, but I expect next month will be less hectic. I’ll email you in in 3 weeks.

In three weeks we connect again only to discover my schedule has gotten more hectic. Friends stop calling/emailing/texting. I stop recognizing them when I see them at ASIFA-East events.

Then, in the deep dark hole the monsters appear. Of the usual kind – left hatred, fear and panic.

- Let me out! let me out! – I scream.

But everybody’s busy celebrating the start of the spring.

July 1st is the deadline we are aiming for.  Will the monsters let me live that long?

A Conversation with Bill Plympton on Kickstarter and Oscars.

We visited Bill Plympton and his son Lucas on Sunday afternoon and recorded a conversation with Bill – on such interesting subjects as scoring music for film, running Kickstarter campaign and qualifying a film for Oscars.

The recording sounds odd, as if we were talking in a furnished metal barrel, but it was Bill’s apartment, indeed. Lucas tried to steer the talk in his direction, but we stayed focussed on the subject.

I love Bill’s optimism, his ability to stay positive, while I sound pretty negative (like, about beating Bill’s new film out of Toronto competition: – Not going to happen.) To my defense – I have been trained by reality (and that special Eastern European philosophy of life: anything can happen at any time and it’s not going to be pretty) . Whatever works for Bill works for Bill only and I haven’t been able to follow his giant footsteps.

I like to dream big but I cling to reality. Maybe too much?

When Bill asked if I am going to qualify “Rocks In My Pockets” for Oscars, the instant answer in my head was: NO. I am not going to qualify a film that has no chance. Why waste time, money and precious hope?

But I couldn’t say that to Bill, because he likes when people think big (that’s another thing that is so great about Bill – he encourages all filmmakers to get ambitious), and I didn’t want to get another lecture on my negative ways of thinking.

So, I slithered away from a confrontation.

That said, I am VERY positive and EXTREMELY ambitious with “Rocks In My Pockets” – on my own scale, not on the scale of that Bill Plympton Realm where Oscars are won and red carpets are rolled and stars treat you like another star.

Here’s my biggest hopes and dreams regarding “Rocks”:

First ambition: against all the odds we will finish the film! with music and sound and color. It will break my back but we’ll get there (and am not joking about my back – it almost broke today like a dry straw).

Second ambition: we will try to get into 5 major festivals: Toronto, Venice, Telluride, Sundance, Berlin. But we are not going to cry if we don’t get in, because we have the Plan B which is

Third ambition: release the film ourselves, online and maybe in art houses. In my Universe this is so much more ambitious than getting nominated for an Oscar. Although, of course, they don’t exclude each other but I keep hearing how pushing a film for Oscars looses money for their producers. Besides, how could a small production like “Rocks” could compete with big studio well oiled with money machine of connections and know-how?

I do dream big. It’s just that’s hard to stay positive when you are so small.

Signe Bill Update Pt 1

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Tricky Women Animation Festival: Films.

Tricky Women is Tricky because animation in German is Trickfilm. Puns are fun. The festival itself is also fun, based in a good looking, friendly town of Vienna.

The festival is organized by a team of great women lead by Waltraud Grausgruber and Birgitt Wagner. They know what they are doing because each screening gets a good, enthusiastic audience of mixed gender. Unlike many other festivals Tricky Women treat their filmmakers as they would treat their visiting family – with warm care and attention.

There was only one thing I missed at the festival that I would suggest they have next time – a Q&A with filmmakers after each screening. To my experience audiences always want to know personal reasons behind making the film, little anecdotes and technical aspects. It would connect the filmmakers with their fans in a more comprehensive way.

This year there were a lot of graduation films in the festival’s program which means that there are many women studying animation, the only question I have is: where do those young and talented women disappear in a few years? I am hoping that the Tricky Women experience will spur the young female animators to continue making films.

I would like to make a note of 16 films from Tricky Women 2013 program that one way or another struck me.

“When One Stops” by Jenni Rahkonen is a graduation film from Turku Arts Academy (Finland). I was taken by unique drawing style and the subject of grief (which can take a form of depression, an affliction am too familiar with). In philosophy the film slightly reminded me of “Flux” by Chris Hinton. But only slightly.  Unfortunately, “When One Stops” is not online, I only found something that looks like Jenni Rahkonen’s school test on YouTube.

When One Stops

“In Vino Veritas”, a  graduation film by Aneta Kýrová Žabková from Czech Republic reminded me of Joanna Quinn’s “Girls’ Night Out” if it was rendered in Michaela Pavlatova’s style and sense of timing. I did see Michaela’s name in the credits and wondered about her influence (great influences are good!).

In Vino Veritas

Charming “Pishto  Goes Away”, Sonya Kendel graduation film from studio SHAR school (Russia), fits within the great tradition of Russian animation. Sonya said that the story idea was based on her mother, who is constantly unhappy with the small details of her life and wishes to run away from it all, but alas, can never run fast or far enough…

Pishto Goes Away

“Catherine The Great” by Anna Kuntsman (Israel), also a debut film, was more of a PSA than entertainment or art, as the characters and situations in the film were extremely simplified to drive the point home. An art film would draw on complexities rather than simplification. Still, the story about a young woman in Moldova responding to an ad for a housekeeper in Israel and getting trapped in a prostitution ring was haunting.

Catherine The Great

“Being Bradford Dillman” by Emma Burch did not suffer from this kind of oversimplification – the film was based on a true story: a girl is told by her alcoholic mother that she, the girl, was born as a boy and her willy was cut off at birth. The mother is not 100 per cent bad – she is trying to be a good parent, but sometimes she fails. I love those kinds of bad-but-good characters. The girl’s situation is very complex, too and I love that there are no clear, realistic answers what would make her upbringing better.

Being Bradford Dillman

By now we all have shared our upset on Facebook that Micaela Pavlatova “Tram” was not nominated for Oscars 2013. Was this snub a sign of sexism? or aging Academy just doesn’t like sex? who knows… one thing for sure – it is a good film and it had won Annecy 2012 Crystal which was always used as a prediction for Oscars before. Nevertheless, I was happy to see it again, for the 13th time.

Tram

“Dog In Heaven” by Jeanette Nørgaard (Denmark). You can watch the whole 25 min film by clicking on this @ symbol which in some languages is called dog (it reminds some people of a sleeping dog with the tail around the body). I enjoyed “Dog In Heaven”  because of it’s wonderful style and subtle poke at Christianity for not allowing dogs to have souls. I love dogs. Regarding the question if animals have souls please see my short “Veterinarian”.

“The Allergy Test” by Mariola Brillowska (Germany): the chromakey green hits your eyes like a green tea ice-cream (have you poked your eyes with an ice-cream cone? I suggest you try just for the Hell of it). It is a fun experience but it almost hurts. The middle age doctor sounds a bit absurd and childish till during the credits you realize it was Mariola Brillowska young daughter’s voice, filtered beyond recognition. If you like weird (and it seemed from some films at the festival that German artists are experts at manufacturing weird) this is your cup of green.

The Allergy Test

“Here and the Great Elsewhere” by Michele Lemieux (Canada). A beautiful pinscreen film that was snubbed by Academy as well. Maybe it made the obvious connection between the pins of the pinscreen making up the story and the particles making up Universe too obvious? It is another mystery snub that Facebook will never solve.

Here and the Great Elsewhere

Sand animation, “A Tangled Tale” by Corrie Francis Parks (USA) . In 2011 Corrie successfully raised funds on Kickstarter for this film. The film is now done and delights international audiences with it’s sweet yet philosophical take on love and relationships.

A Tangled Tale

Sundance 2013 alumnus “Bite of the Tale” by Song E Kim (Usa/ Korea). I loved the suspense and mystery of this film, and I do love the subjects of doctors and of our insides. But I found the ending too arbitrary/random. Otherwise it would have been a perfect film.  It cracked my heart. But I took a note of the name and shall root for the Song E Kim next film!

Bite of the Tale

“n arratives” by Eva Becker (Germany), you can see the whole film by clicking on this $%# , a symbol that depicts my be-puzzlement. Something strange had happened at the screening: German speaking part of the audience was in stiches, some people where rolling off their chairs in fits of laughter, while international, non-German speakers were looking at each other with confusion – WTF? It made me realize that even with the subtitles some things can never cross into other persons head. Culture and language can build walls between us that only sex can tear down.

n arratives

In “Tunnel” by Maryam Kashkoolinia (Iran), sand animation technique supports the narrative of a man digging a tunnel to get on the other side of a border to buy a sheep. It is funny at times but doesn’t end well. The text at the end of the film informs us about Gaza blockade and the amount of Palestinians that die each year in the tunnels trying to bring some food and other necessities from Egypt to Gaza. The fact that the film is from Iran made me pause. Politics in that region are never straight forward.

- Are you aware that those tunnels were used to bring rockets from Egypt to bomb Israel and kill innocent civilians?- asked an animator from Israel.

- Of course, I am aware! – Maryam Kashkoolinia said calmly. – And I agree with you – it is tragic. But I chose to tell a story from a point of view of one man who has his private motivations to dig a tunnel – to feed his family. I am not a political person. I want to communicate a human experience.

Could a film that empathizes with another human being make a difference?

Tunnel

“Out of Nowhere” by Isca Mayo, Maayan Tzuriel graduation film from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Israel) was almost the only 3D film in the festival’s competition program. It made me ponder why there were no more 3D films in the selection: was it because women prefer different materials (sand, cututs, stop motion) for their animated stories, or is it because making 3D is more expensive, or is it because technology and gadgets are just not that interesting for women or is is because the selection was made the certain way? I liked the look of “Out Of Nowhere” and the surreal mood. Someone told me that the film was a social commentary. I was too jet lagged to think of what the commentary could be. But now I think we tend to read too much into things – if a film is from Israel, it doesn’t necessarily mean it has a social commentary.

Out of Nowhere

“Kellerkind” by Julia Ocker (Germany), graduation from from Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, was made with the help of TVPaint software and it shows in digital brush strokes. But seeing digits didn’t bother me at all. The story is a dark take on motherhood, it’s psychologically complex and thrilling. Short and concise, it is delivered with cinematic mastery. I highly recommend the film to festival programmers and audiences. Unfortunately, there is no clip to see online.

Kellerkind

“Red River” by François Leroy and Stephanie Lansaque, a couple!  They made “Mei Ling” a few years ago. Remember the girl who runs away with an octopus in a convertible? I’m  a big fan of that film. François and Stephanie know how to create a very special mood. Although in the case of “Red River” the film didnt have to be animated, it could have worked as a live action.

Red River, Song Hong

 

Submit your work to Tricky Women! They rock!

PS There is more to say on women and their festivals but I have to get back to work.

Women Film Festivals: Do We need Them?

Recently Ottawa International Animation Festival director and programmer Chris Robinson asked in a private Facebook message to 10 female animators what they felt about gender specific festivals. Namely – programs of films made only by women.

It was a surprise for me to see that among the 10 women there was no consensus that this kind of programing is healthy and good. Some of them said that a women-only program is demeaning, it’s a segregations that promotes further isolation, others said that we should be considered equal to men and thus there should be no gender specific festivals, some others said that selecting films based on gender is meaningless on scale of humanity – we all basically have the same needs and obsessions that reflect on our work.

My personal opinion on this subject has evolved over last 15 years. In the hopeful beginning of making animated films I dismissed any differences between men film makers and women film makers.

- In the field of making animated shorts women are better off than men, – I proudly claimed. – Because we are not expected to make loads of money, we are free to make whatever we please. Men, on the other hand, have tremendous pressures to make money so that they could take a girl out for an expensive dinner.

After 15 years of making animated shorts I started to want bigger challenges with higher budget projects. An opportunity would come:

- We love your work! Pitch your ideas to us!

and then it would go:

- Your ideas are great but since we need to please young male audiences, they are not for us. Good bye!

And I would see how a great budget project would go to a young male director-animator.

I would also experience discrimination from women film festivals – quite a few notable women festivals have rejected my film so consistently that I stopped submitting to them long ago. Of course, am not surprised – main characters of quite a few of my films (“Dentist”, “Veterinarian”) are men. Besides, my films don’t have a gender agenda (no one gender is better than the other, I just tell a story). So, I get it – my films are not for young males, so they don’t get shown on TV, my films don’t defend or promote women issues, so they are not shown at women festivals. And it is fine – there are other venues (general audience festivals, websites, blogs) to show one’s work, although without much of a pay. I was trained not to be bitter, so I only slightly soured.

- Women festivals are for the films that can’t get in anywhere else, – I claimed. Partly I was was proud that my films were accepted so well into ‘normal’ festivals and partly I was sour by rejection of my own gender.

Then in 2010 Tricky Women Animation Festival in Austria invited me to have a retrospective. It was the most amazing experience – I saw enthusiastic mixed gender audiences in sold out screenings, I saw films that I would not normally see and I was happy to note (at least the way I perceived it) a difference in the films made by women – they were more poetic, made a good use of metaphors and didn’t strive for narrative clarity typical for commercial films. They seemed inspired by art rather than a story or a character, and were not afraid to invest time and work in manual craft – stop motion, cut-out, sand animation rather than animation technology and softwares. This, of course, was a very superficial observation, as it was based on a selection made by specific women in specific circumstances.

Nevertheless, Tricky Women made me realize that women film festivals do a very important work. First and the most obvious – to showcase quality work that for one reason or another has limited opportunity to be seen by wider audiences. Many of those films, some poetically, some – more straight forward,  bring up issues that are important  specifically to women, like – body image, motherhood, identity crisis, menstruation, menopause, human trafficking and prostitution etc. But some films just depict the world the way we see it, though a lens maybe softer, gentler than men’s.

An audience benefits from seeing those films by experiencing this different point of view. But filmmakers also benefit from their films shown at a festival. One cannot become a better filmmaker if she hasn’t seen her film in front of an audience, if she hasn’t seen her film in the context of other films. There is a value in encouragement, but more than that – being at a festival makes you realize that you may want to make more films, build a body of work – because there is a need for it.

In the same 2010 I was invited to Flying Broom International Women’s Film Festival in Turkey. I was not able to go, so they had my retrospective without my presence. Among other films they screened my “Teat Beat of Sex” and “Birth”. In the beginning I didn’t give it much thought, but at some point I realized that Turkey is still a very traditional, conservative country and that showing “Teat Beat of Sex” in such a country is a daring act of defiance. When Flying Broom invited Swedish animator Lasse Persson to present his work (which explores the subject of cross dressing)  and do a lecture on gender bending I knew that Flying Broom is probably one of the most important festivals in the world. One of the tasks of women film festivals is to push the edge, the boundaries between what is socially acceptable now and what we want to have in the more emancipated future.

I was privileged to attend Tricky Women 2013 and shall write about it soon.

Tricky Women 2013 participants and organizers:

 

 

 

 

Kickstarter Aftermath: Packing Rewards.

Guess what – on Valentine’s Day morning, after we reached our Kickstarter goal, I went to a local liquor store and got a bottle of Moscato. Not that I know much or care about Moscato, but drinking champaign at lunch time seemed decadent. The team effort had to be acknowledged with something more modest.

- Lets celebrate!

The five of us (Mike, Rashidah, Wendy, Masha and me) clinked the glasses wishing all 800 backers could be with us to celebrate.

The next day we went back to working on the film. After 30 days of intensely staring at the computer screen I was finally back to staring at animation drawings, shading them with a pencil.

Around 5PM I went to the bathroom, sat down on the toilet and looked at a drawing in front of me (YES on the bathroom door we have a drawing of a bunny looking at you while you sit there doing your business; it is because we thought people would behave better in this secluded space if they had someone looking at them; before had we placed the bunny drawing on the door there were too many inexplicable things happening in this common use bathroom, bunny seems to reign in the toilet madness).

All of sudden right in front of me, between me and the bunny a shimmering sharp edged ring appeared. I blinked. Blinked again. The ring didn’t disappear.  I tried to look at the bunny but everything I looked at was out of focus, while everything I was not looking at was in focus. I shook my head, rubbed my eyes. The ring was getting bigger.

I thought my normal environment would brings things back to normal and run back to my work table,  sat down and looked at the drawing that was half finished. The drawing was visible but to really see it was a huge effort because shimmering of the ring was very distracting. The ring was getting bigger and bigger and a thought occurred that once it goes out of my sight, I might die.

But I didn’t feel like dying. My body actually felt better than ever.

The ring now got so big it went out of my periphery. It was gone.

Five minutes later a sharp pain pricked my brain like a needle. Then it stopped.

Since that moment I have been dizzy as if I have been swimming in Ocean for 2 hours and now am back on beach.

Strange!

But no time to dwell on feelings, we have work to do!

Masha Yukhananov came to help us with packing rewards.

We were packing 136 DVDs today!

Each envelope got a special drawing on top. I am not sure if Post Office will accept those artisan envelopes, we’ll find out tomorrow.

(please note, my hand is so red and wrinkled because I have to wash dishes in ice cold water)

At the end of the day each DVD got it’s envelope, drawing and address. Each backer will now get their DVD!

PS the fast expanding sharp edged ring was scintillating scotoma

Hard Data Vs. Soft Data of a Kickstarter campaign.

In Digital Age it’s seductive to reduce people to numbers, as it makes hard data easily available.

- My video has been viewed 41,374 times on YouTube!

- My blog had 52,937 visitors last year!

- I have 1,237 friends on Facebook!

- I have watched 475 cat videos in last 10 days!

There is hard data of  “Rocks In My Pockets” recent and successful Kickstarter campaign, too. In 30 days it received $50,780 from 800 backers.

But how about soft data? Each of the 800 backers had a unique reason to pledge their hard earned money to the film they haven’t seen yet. Each pledge had a unique human story behind it. Each person’s desire to join their story with mine was deeply personal.

While I was preparing for the campaign I was told to learn working with spreadsheets, to keep track of each person I was going to accost, I was accosting or had accosted about their possible contribution. I had read a recount of a successful Kickstarter campaign for a live action feature whose director was boasting about his spreadsheet system. He had even measured how much time he spent campaigning, down to a minute! What alerted me, though, that 2,5 years after his campaign I haven’t heard anything about that film getting made. Sometimes obsession with numbers and winning can overwhelm the need to create.

Since I was doing the campaign work more or less by myself, I had no time to do everything, and had to prioritize. Besides, I am really bad with numbers. The need that gets me out of the bed each morning, the need that pushes me to do things I do is the need to hook people with my stories. I admit, it is not entirely healthy, some people would call is neurotic and others – self destructive (I would skip a dinner if I could tell a story to a small crowd).

I decided to focus on the story aspect of our campaign, not the numbers.

What was the story that I was going to tell to the potential backers? A few very sensible people told me not to mention word ‘depression’ in the film’s paperwork.

- No one wants to see a film about depressed women, – the sensible consensus was. – You should sell it as ‘animation’, as ‘comedy’, as ‘art film’. Keep depression out of it.

The problem with that approach was that the film already had support from people who wanted to see “a funny film about depression”. To change it to “a romantic comedy in the midst of European 20th century calamities” would not only be a small lie (just a tiny lie because yes, there are elements of romantic comedy and there are plenty of European 20th century calamities in the backdrop of the main story) but it would betray the trust of the very early backers who came on board in 2010-2011.

Besides, for me, the whole point of making the film was to rebel against the stigma attached to mental illness, to incite a conversation about it. Like a horse cannot run away from it’s legs, I can’t run away from the subject of my film.

I came to “Rocks” potential backers with the following story: I am an independent animator who knows depression quite well and decided to make a funny film about depression for two reasons: first, to share my story with other people so that they know they are not alone in their suffering. Second –  laughter makes a distance between Self and  suffering. To laugh is to heal. Lets laugh together.

My take on running a Kickstarter campaign – it is a lot of work. There is no Magic Formula or Shortcuts. One has to sit down and do her homework, for many long hours. But to summarize it quickly:

- when I did my research before the campaign, I read that success of a Kickstarter campaign is most likely if the key members of the project have more than 1000 Facebook friends or/and 1000 Twitter followers. I second that.

- one must have more than 2000 email addresses in her email Address Book. True.

- personalized emails work much better than mass emails. Indeed.

- after each pledge please connect with each backer in a meaningful way. The Kickstarter campaign is not so much about money and reaching the goal, as connecting the film with it’s core audience.

I foresee that this new way of financing films – crowdfinancing – is going to promote an entirely different creative personality. For centuries we saw an artist, mainly a man, erected on a pedestal, or aspiring to be on that pedestal or failing to be in that pedestal.

Once on the pedestal, he was bestowed admiration, as if just looking at him would give the rest of mortals a glimpse to Eternity.

Just 10 years ago being an asshole made your reputation as an uncompromising Artist, a Genius of Perfection.

Not in the Times of Crowdfinancing. The asshole has to wash up and go through his lists just like any other ordinary mortal. If he had offended too many people on his list, burned too many bridges, his project won’t get financed.

A more humble artist, a team player is on the raise. The one who makes films for reasons other than making a name and being on a pedestal. Perhaps, it is a woman.