WHAT ARE OTHER PEOPLE DOING

FILM CONSIDERATION

I'm making a film about space. A film about music. And a film about being alone.

Emotionally I want this film to be touching, I want people to at least feel something at the end and through the development of the film I'm really worried I'll loose site of that, so I keep reminding myself that, that's the plan.

Here's the big films I've looked at to inform my film.

JOHN LEWIS

The John Lewis Christmas adverts have a fantastic way of making you feel meloncholy. They're always short and make me believe that achieving that kind of emotional depth in a very short space of time is entirely achievable. There premises are always pretty simple, but constructed in a way that means you don't see it coming till it happens. I love these two in particular and I cry pretty much every time I watch them. I would be pretty pleased if i can create something of a similar emotional resonance.

BUT MILK IS IMPORTANT

I think I mentioned "But Milk is Important Before" and I'm mentioning it here again because it's relivant in subject matter. But milk is important is about an agoraphobe who's routine is disrupted when the man who brought his milk dies. This forces him to challenge his agoraphobia but he's not particularly pleased about the idea.

The similarities are in the idea of isolation, however "But Milk is Important" is more about transitioning and adapting to not being alone. There is a lot of overlap in the times where the character is alone. It's nice to look at how a character communicates with themselves when only in their own company.

Fallin' Floyd

I also mentioned "Fallin' Floyd' before. Again this one is similar in subject matter so warrented some of my attention. Fallin' Floyd is about a musician who falls on hard times. In those hard times a physical manifestation of his depression develops and for a while he runs, for a while he's content and in the end he gets better and goes back to being a musican again.

It's the musically driven element of this film that got me to watch it but again the element of self interaction was interesting. And as we know I was pretty drawn to the character design of the emotions.

Wall-e

Getting a little bit more commercial with my considerations, here's "wall-e". Wall-e shares a lot in common with Lute. Other than Lute being human and having more limitations in space than wall-e does, they are both lonely, traveling through space in the persuit of emotional fulfliment and neither of them can talk.

I know I mentioned before that I was glad that PIXAR broke the mold on sound with this film but I'm also very glad it was in a film with similar situations to mine. It means that I don't have to spend time panicking that it's not even possible. It completely is.

I love Wall-e and Eva's relationship in this as well. It's beautiful and full of nice shots so I enjoy watching that scene because it's very few elements but it elicites a very emotional response.

ECHOS

Calum sent this to me earlier today. It's very short but it's very musically driven. And the music is very impactful. It's interesting to remember the contrast between the film I'm making and the kinds of films being made around me with similar elements.

PETER VACZ

Peter Vacz is one of my favourite stop motion animators. He chooses a very interesting materials and mixes them in a way I really like. He makes a somewhat level playing field for all the elements that means they merge together convincingly but also in a very stylistic way. I don't at all feel like he sacrafices anything for the combination of both materials. Which is something I am very interested in doing myself.

This is the video he made for Jame's Dear John. I feel repeatedly drawn to it mainly becasue of the lead male puppet. Specifically the composition of his head. It's round but he looks very battered becasue of the use of balsa wood as his main construction combined withe the rough multicoloured palette that he hints at. I think about this puppet a lot when I think about Lute's head. Mainly because I want Lute's head to catch lots of the pink and blue and purple from the sky around him. If I was to paint some of that colour on him directly then he would always reflect his setting. I think that's important becasue I don't want the elements to jar too much and the audience to feel a disconnect between him and the setting. And as we know from features like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" If you have your animated elements repeatedly interacting with the live action elements then you believe them to share the same space.

I love this music video. This wasn't the first one of Vacz' I ever saw. The first was, of course, Rabbit and Deer. But this was the first one that I found thouroughly compelling. I remember being obsessed with the mask because of the way it was made. I loved the rough textured edges and almost polygonal triangles he seemed to make his characters from. The other thing I really loved about this video was the use of cotton wool as fire. He uses cotton wool a few times in more than just this film (above in dear john for example) and I just loved it. It was fun, it worked but I'd never seen it like that before.

I think it's safe to say that Vacz influences most of the things I do in some way, just by being so high up my list of favourites.

CHRIS BALDIE

I know I mentioned Chris before but I think he should be mentioned again for a variert of reasons.

These stills are two comics from an adorable book I bought from him called "It's Dark out here" and it's a wonderful collection of mini jokes but it's done in a way that really got me thinking about how small issues in space can be. You always see holywood making blockbusters set in space where everything blows up and this person nearly ends us flying through space for years and that guy's dead. But no one every makes a film about how hard it is to paint in space because everything is just black.

I know I've been thinking about these things but Chris has too. The scale of this book adds to it's charm and the character has a lot of similarities to Lute. I only bought this comic a couple of weeks ago but it's alreay one of the best things I own. But this isn't Chris' only space themed narration.

There's also "Space Captain". Space captain is only 3 issues long at the moment and each issue is pretty short but it's already something I'm excited to read more of. The story doesn't draw a lot of similarities with mine, it draws many more with Marvel's Captain America, but Space Captain himself and lute might share some stylistic decisions. I love Chris' illustrations and his shot choices are interesting too. I feel like it's important to me to have a breadth of sequential image influences.