American Cinematographer - January 2008 - 12

All of the puppets in the film have human eyes, an effect the filmmakers achieved in collaboration with portrait artist/animator/ compositor Jason Walker. Madame Tutli-Putli, Szczerbowski and Lavis decided to use a Canon EOS D30 digital still camera because the short film “required a lot more resolution than our standard-def commercial work — our final output was to be an HD master (1920x1080) that would be transferred to 35mm for exhibition at Cannes and other festivals,” says Lavis. “The Canon proved more than adequate, but unfortunately, it had no live output, so we had to improvise an assist.” They did this by affixing “a cheap Webcam” to the top of the camera with tape and elastic bands; the Webcam assist was plugged into the DPS Reality and the Animate program, while the Canon was plugged into a Mac G4. Shots were taken using Canon’s Remote Capture software. “The only difficulties to this setup were that our live view and our true view had slightly different angles, and we were forced to take each frame twice, hitting one button for the assist and another for the Canon,” notes Lavis. The assist ended up recording at 30 fps, whereas the shots from the Canon were being taken in at 24 fps. The animation seemed to be happening in proper time according to the assist, but turned out to be slower and more graceful when the 24-fps stills were rendered. “In animation, you worry that you’re not making slow-enough moves,” says Szczerbowski. The discrepancy in frame rates “saved us at times — it added a certain dimension of fragility to the animation.” All of the puppets, sets and props were built using materials from garbage, antique shops or hardware stores. Puppet armatures were made of aluminum wire, skin was silicone (because of its capacity to absorb light rather than reflect it), and muscles were foam latex. There was one puppet for every character, and each puppet stood between 12" and 16" tall. Wardrobe was hand-tailored from found fabrics by Laurie Maher, a professional dressmaker who was also the model for TutliPutli. There are dozens of special effects packed into Tutli-Putli’s 17minute running time — the fluttering of a moth’s wings, a train speeding by, a wobbly chessboard, and even the simple snapping of Tutli’s dress. Inspired by the work of Russian animator Ladislaw Starewicz (The Cameraman’s Revenge), the filmmakers achieved many of these effects in camera, using a slow shutter speed to create motion blur; hooks attached to fishing wire were hooked into fabric or a puppet and tugged while the frame was exposed. In one scene, Tutli-Putli has a nightmare in which some sinister-looking visitors disembowel another passenger, and Tutli-Putli runs from car to car in an attempt to escape them. Lavis and Szczerbowski found the hallway they were shooting in too narrow to accommodate the camera, so they broke down the set piece-by-piece as the shot progressed. For the same scene, they used pieces of mirror glass they’d collected from their street to bounce random shapes of light across the set. “We were avid readers of American Cinematographer during the process of creating this film,” says Lavis. “Unlike other trade magazines, whose content is no more than digital minutiae, AC still provides innovative and practical advice for independent filmmakers like us. Our unique challenge was to translate AC articles down to puppet scale. For example, if a human-scale film used Kino Flos for a particular effect, we 12 January 2008

American Cinematographer - January 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2008