A finely crafted and charming animated short coming out this month, by Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels. The film is co-produced by Beast Animation, Vivement Lundi!, Polaris Film Productions and il Luster Films. Read further as Director Emma De Swaef graciously speaks with us about the production:

How long is the film and when did the production take place?

16 min. 30 sec. From construction to post-production, it took a year – from January 2011 to January 2012

Can you tell us about the production?

We constructed most of the sets and puppets at a lovely French studio called Vivement Lundi!, then put everything in a big truck and drove to the Belgian studio Beast Animation for the shoot. We shot in rotation on three sets: a small one for interiors and two larger sets for exteriors. Marc James Roels and I dressed and lit the sets on one platform while the two others were being animated on. The shoot took four months and by the end we were sleeping in the studio next to the sets on a very uncomfortable fold-out bed so we wouldn’t waste any time commuting!

Who animated?

Andreas De Ridder, Alice Tambellini, Steven De Beul and myself. The animation posed extra challenges as we wanted specific parts of the the wool to move at every frame, so even if there was no movement we had to touch the puppets before taking an image- being careful not to touch any of the fibres on the set around it. Wool also ‘breathes’, so we couldn’t take overnight breaks, every shot had to be finished in one day: this usually meant very long days for the animators.

Before ‘Oh Willy…’ Alice had never animated with Dragonframe so she was a little nervous about that, but she picked it up straight away—it’s a very intuitive program.

Can you tell us about some of the tougher shots to pull off—creatively or technically?

The biggest challenge was the fact that everything is made out of wool or textile. This made animating the puppets extremely difficult. Nearly all the shots were conceived based on these limitations. We also wanted to retain the fuzzy, wiry texture of the wool so green-keying was almost immediately ruled out. We have a very lo-tech approach and wanted to create a sense of wide open space on set without relying too much on post-production. Every element in every shot was a real on-set element so we had to come up with all kinds of on-set solutions to make everything look ‘real’. For example, distant objects needed to be scaled down and diffused to create a sense of distance, we strapped wool to the lenses to create foreground fog, we made huge diffusion panels using cheap plastic and created clouds by suspending bits of freshly cut sheep’s wool on chicken wire.

How did the film idea start?

We were inspired by Diane Arbus’ photos of people living in nudist colonies.

-Emma De Swaef

Thanks Emma, beautiful work!