The Oscar-nominated filmmaker discusses his and Maciek Szczerbowski’s latest stop-motion tour de force, how the tough decision to cut 3 minutes was the right call, and how a ‘beautiful film’ is easily forgotten if the story doesn’t move the audience.
Every filmmaker wants to make a beautiful movie.But, according to Chris Lavis, known for directing the beautiful stop-motion short with Maciek Szczerbowski and their Clyde Henry Productions studio, making a beautiful film isn’t enough.
“No one cares about a beautiful movie,” says Lavis.“We've all been to Annecy and seen beautiful movies that you forget.We wanted people to come to us at the end of this movie and ask, ‘Was the girl real?’ We really wanted people to concentrate on the story.” , the latest film from the Oscar-nominated pair since their 2019 stop-motion short, , tells a haunting and romantic tale that takes place in a smokey, snowy earth-tone-covered Montreal, at the dawn of the 20th century.
In the film, a poor boy falls in love with a girl, trapped in a sorrowful home, whose tears turn into pearls.The boy sells them to a ruthless pawnbroker, who becomes obsessed with the value of the pearls, which smell of the sea.Tempted by greed, the boy must choose between his love for the girl and the fortune he could obtain.
The choice could damn his soul.Check out the trailer: Lavis and Szczerbowski’s stop-motion parable of desire, deception and the price of innocence is narrated by Colm Feore and scored by Patrick Watson with animation direction from Brigitte Henry.won the Benshi Award from Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Short Film at TIFF, the CFI Award for Best Canadian Animation at Ottawa International Animation Festival and more. The film is produced and distributed by The National Film Board of Canada which, over the course of its 85 years of making film history, has racked up 78 Oscar nominations and 11 wins for its productions and co-productions, as well as received an honorary Academy Award. “I think there's something about when a Canadian finds themselves wanting to make cinema, animation is a real possibility to do at home because of The National Film Board of Canada,” says Lavis.
“The seed of this story is about 15 years old and actually came out of the era when we were working with the NFB on another film, .” , about a woman who boards a train with excessive amounts of luggage in an effort to run away from her past, made Lavis and Szczerbowski famous for being the “real eyes guys” as the film used motion capture to impose the real eyes of actors onto their stop-motion character models.During production on a scene where actor Laurie Maher had to cry, a pearl necklace accidentally broke and scattered pearls all over the set floor.As Laurie cried on set, staying in character, Szczerbowski looked down at the floor and the idea for started to take shape. But that was 2007 and it would be some time before the idea was film-ready. “We had the image of this poor girl, like a Hans Christian Andersen kind of character, crying pearls, sweeping them up, putting them in a hole in the wall, and a boy watching through the other side,” explains Lavis.
“But we had a hard time writing it.We would spit out ideas, shoot it, and it didn’t work.And that happens.
You can create two years’ worth of animation and have a beautiful movie, but not have a good movie.” But things started to come together when the team was advised by composer Watson to cut out three minutes worth of animation. “The old man who's telling this story to the little girl, we kept cutting back to them in the film because the girl would interject and talk and Patrick eventually came to us and said, ‘You're killing me with the music here because every time you go back to the present you're killing my mood,’” shares Lavis.“He told us, ‘I just have time to set up a feeling in the music, and then you pull me out of the water, and then you throw me back in.You've got to cut these scenes.’ So we tried it and he was right.
It worked.We combined that with some of the short story details we had in the original treatment and, suddenly, we had a movie.” While doesn’t use real eyes capture like , the emotions of the characters are still conveyed through extremely detailed, oil-painted eyes on silicone head molds covered in white plastic.The characters are meant to look like old wooden dolls.
“This was the first time we’d used 3D printing so extensively for a project,” notes Lavis.“I think the most interesting thing we did on this in terms of 3D printing is that there are close ups and inserts in the movie.For example, when the girl cries, there's an insert of her face crying.
And for that, we scanned the original puppet and did a large-scale printout so that we could do an insert.In the old days, we would have had to resculpt a face to try to make it look as close as we could to the smaller version.In this case, it's an identical replica of the face.
It's not cutting edge, but for us it was exciting.” This is also only the second movie Lavis and Szczerbowski have made with any kind of dialogue.The first was their film . “For that film, we developed a technique with Felix & Paul Studios, who was the co-producer of the CG mouths that were designed to look like replacement mouths,” shares Lavis.“For , we took that a step further.” Explaining why the team prefers CG mouths, Lavis added, “Replacement mouths have to be digitally fixed anyway, and we wanted to preserve a certain spontaneity in the animation process because the film was designed to be in French and English with perfectly intrinsic versions that weren’t dubbed.
We wanted the freedom to make small tweaks on the script right to the end.” Working with Daniel Gies at E.D.FILMS and skilled animators at the NFB, the team worked very hard, up until “the last second” according to Lavis, to pull off the CG mouths. “For a while, it looked like CG mouths on a puppet, and that was deadly,” says Lavis.“These puppets needed to talk without breaking the illusion or the romance of a hand-crafted puppet.
It was very stressful and only came together three months before Annecy.If people had come up to us and asked, ‘How did you do the mouths?’ instead of, ‘Was the girl ever real?’ then we’re sunk.” For Lavis, the ultimate goal was getting viewers lost in the story, rather than captivated by the animation.While the puppets are detailed and the sets are intricate, using clay and silicone to craft things the team couldn’t find around thrift shops or reuse from the set of, it’s all in an effort to get the audience so immersed and lost in the world and the story that they don’t question how things were made.
They should only be looking for details to decipher the motives and emotions of characters they’ve, hopefully, become invented in. “When we were first brainstorming for our characters, we laid out big pieces of paper and made a mood board for every character and every location,” notes Lavis.“So, there's a central image, which is a drawing of a character, and then we surround that character with a collage of all the research and ideas that got us to that character.” He continues, “For example, the pawnbroker in our film is based on these Dickensian villains with their long coats, but his face is based on the 19th century English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley.Aubrey was not an evil pawnbroker, of course, but he had a great face.
And our pawnbroker’s long coat, we decided, was probably his father's coat, and worth some money because his family used to have money.So, he dresses as a man from the time when his family had money, which shows his desperation to regain that fortune.From there, we built our puppets.” But audience reactions, as we know, are out of the filmmakers’ hands.
And as continues its festival circuit run, Lavis and the team hope viewers are entranced by the story. “You put these films out into the world and you think they’re your babies but they are actually like teenagers,” says Lavis.“They’ll live their life.Every time I get sent on a trip, it’s because of the film.
It has nothing to do with me anymore.The film is its own.” Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime.She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment.
Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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