A few weeks ago, the team at Show Me Shorts made me a very lucky boy by offering me a sneaky look at one of the shorts in their programme, as well as an e-interview with the filmmaker of the short. Of course, I HAD to choose the stop-motion animated film made by one dude over the course of a decade.
Brett Foxwell’s Fabricated is a triumphant piece of solo filmmaking, an out-of-this-world Darwinian tale of a dinosaur-like creature making sense of its steal-iron-bone surroundings – a steam-junk Jurassic Park, if you will.
It’s a pretty overwhelming experience, especially given the time and man-power it took to create it, so my first question to Foxwell was: how much time went into this?
“About 25 hours per week,” Foxwell answered. “Some weeks had 60 hours of building and animating while other weeks and months I wouldn’t even look at the thing – which was difficult because the whole project usually filled whatever apartment I was living in at the time.”
The project ended up living in eight different apartments in four different American states, moving wherever Foxwell and his camera went.
“2005 came at just the right time to prevent me from filming it on 16mm film – my original goal. A digital setup with the newly-affordable DSLR allowed me to be much more flexible with the animation and have better feedback with respect to acting, lighting and motion control. The camera was upgraded several times. I shot in sequence, so over the course of the production, the camera gets better – which luckily worked out well.”
The characters in the film went through a similar process of evolution. “Theirs is the story of how life might evolve beyond organic means with the materials left behind by a fallen technological empire. The initial conception was to form these particular creatures from parts at hand and then build a world that spanned the spectrum of materials, from rust to copper to brass, then to steel and beyond. The creatures set out into this world, and we wrote the script along the way.”
This ad hoc approach ran a similar line to how Foxwell animated. “I didn’t do any rehearsals and blocking was minimal. I would meticulously run through the shot in my head, and while animating, I could see the results immediately on the monitor. I’d play to the camera at one-thousandth the speed of normal acting.”
Via bfophoto.com
Via bfophoto.com
The sound design, often a thankless job, is crucial to Fabricated. From the eerie ambiance to the lo-fi screeches these lifeforms emit, the audio art goes a long way to embedding the audience in the wrecked wilderness of this world.
“There are usually one or two things in a shot that I will have a very clear idea of what I want to sound like. Every sound I placed then made me notice three other things that cried out for sound. I must give massive credit to the sound design team – Ryan Mauk, John France, Chris Vibberts and Andrew Poole Todd – for their sonic creations as they took on some of the most difficult sections. My direction mostly consisted of ‘just look at the picture and record that craziest thing that comes to you’.”
All the effort is evident in the final piece, a staggering short to witness. Clocking in at 20 minutes, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like for Foxwell to arduously take on this project for ten years on a day-to-day, shot-to-shot basis.
“It felt like every 20-30 hour shot followed a similar trajectory:
A) I can bang this out in eight hours for sure.
B) I’m six hours into my third eight-hour session and this shot looks terrible, the whole project is ruined.
C) This shot is the most perfect in the entire film.
“Finishing it at 5am of the fourth morning, I would then spend 45 minutes watching the eight-second shot loop over and over.
“The labour was intense, but the results were always worth the effort. Once you get far enough into a project like this, you have no choice but to finish.”
Fabricated is playing as part of Show Me Shorts 2016 in the sections Bump in the Night and Highlights. Tickets are still available for the Auckland Opening Night (Oct 1) and the Wellington Opening Night (Oct 13).
We’ve also got two double passes to any Show Me Shorts session up for grabs.
For everything you need to know about where and when Show Me Shorts is playing, head over to our handy dandy guide.
