Animator Chris Wilder:
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Firstly, Daisy designed the film herself, she has a very distinct illustration style and we made set models that looked like her flat illustrations rendered in 3D. We then went about sourcing life sized furniture and props that would fit inside the world she had created, anything we couldn’t source I would make out of paper maché and Daisy would paint. I also had to recreate out of paper maché any of the props that had to either be lifted by a character or pulled into the wall, so that they would be light enough to animate and easy to cut up (this involved us sitting in a small dimly lit room with bars on the window for a month covered in masking tape… slightly grim).
In terms of the animation, Daisy would paint the characters straight ahead on the wall surfaces and I would control the arms that came out of the wall and anything they interacted with ie, kettles, trays and the occasional vegetable. I animated the arms by attaching them to a piece of sellotape which was then attached to the wall, sort of a winching method I guess, this along with placing objects such as boxes, sticks, and bottles (which were painted the same colour as the background) under the arm helped keep them elevated long enough for us to take the shot.
There were a few occasions where the object we were animating was so heavy that we had to attach it to the wall the best we could, hold it until the the other person was ready to take the shot, then let go and run, hoping that it hadn’t fallen by the time we’d jumped the 12 feet out of frame. They should suggest life sized stop motion as a weight loss technique – we were both horribly skeletal by month 5.
The shots that were the most challenging were probably the pour sequence, where a character starts pouring water into a cup, which overflows and then fills the entire room, and the scene in which a character hoovers up the living room set. These two sections were animated by both myself and Daisy as they were so involved and our time deadline was very tight, there was one day where we animated non stop for 16 hours at which point Daisy started giggling hysterically and I started to cry. We should have made notes for a study on exhaustion!
Thank you, Chris and bigger than life congratulations to Daisy and team! This is a huge achievement (no pun intended). We will hold on tight to our paper maché seats in anticipation of the release of the full version of this very enchanting film. We highly recommend our readers go out to the upcoming festivals if they live nearby.
-Dragonframe
The excellent “Bigger Picture” Making of video:
Original film credits:
Full running Time: 8 mins
Director: Daisy Jacobs
Producer: Chris Hees
Stop Motion Animator: Chris Wilder
(Chris was also recently lead animator on Sleeping with the Fishes)
VFX artist : Janusz Tomczyk
Editor: Vera Simmonds
Screenwriters: Daisy Jacobs and Jennifer Majka
Director of Photography: Max Williams
Production Designer: Elo Soode
Sound Editor/Rerecording Mixer: Jonas Andreas Jensen
Composer: Huw Bunford
SFX Supervisor/Online Editor/Grade: Ross Allen
Principal Cast: Alisdair Simpson, Anne Cunningham, Christopher Nightingale
Production Assistant Gemma Priggen
Blog written by Vera Long