Update on new Festival selections :
OTTAWA (which I will be able to attend!),
ANIMA and FANTOCHE.

I am happy to announce that my film is going to compete
in Hiroshima and Melbourne this summer!

A few words on the animation of the fish:

Many people have been asking me if I used a wire structure inside the fish to animate it, the answer is no. The actual bones of the fish provided all the structure I needed to move jaw and fins around, I just had to find a way to hold the poses still while I was shooting frame by frame. The solution I found most successful was to work with the fish in a half frozen state.

After purchase of the bass at the fishmarket, I'd stick it in the freezer until I was ready for a full night of animating (stop-motion 101: if you want consistent lighting, daylight is not your friend ;-D). I would take the stinky bastard out a few hours ahead of shooting, while setting up the lights and camera. The fish would thaw from stonehard to kind of rigid in 3 hours, and for a while, its head, fins and mouth would have the right rigidity in order to hold a pose for a while.

So I'd animate as fast as I could, until the fish thawed completely and its jaw went slack... that is when invisible thread was useful : I'd lift the slack jaw with a string which I'd attach to an overhead structure off-screen. Later I could easily mask the thread out of the frames, if it showed too much.

Gross Trivia : somehow the inner stuff of the fish started bloating after a week, and that pressure tended to push its tongue out of its mouth... I had no choice but to ram it back down its throat with my fingers, and was instantly rewarded with a sound that is too obscene for words. It was easy to forget that this was actually a slowly decaying dead body I was animating. Some orange pus oozing from underneath its gill cover during the shooting was a nice reminder of that.

Just did this poster for the film.
I hate to admit that I spent hours on this damn thing, when I could be working on a new project instead....

    Whenever possible, I try to create some interesting and dramatic lighting on the set: having no professional lightspots, I  unplug all the lamps in my apartment to help illuminate the scene and give it a nice 3 point lighting. But sometimes, I find myself with utterly flatly lit footage, like in the car scene here (cramming all the lights in my Honda and still getting the fucking green screen lit evenly against the window frame sure didn't help).

   This is when composting comes in handy. And, Jesus Christ, bless Adobe for giving us After Effects! I go to town on color correction, throw in a couple of virtual lights (well, in this case, more than a couple...) and the scene looks much better already.  I find that I can really enhance the staging idea of a scene by shaping the light and shadow areas on screen, directing the eye exactly where I want it to look.
        
      If done right, the stakes of the scene are instantly readable to the audience. In this scene, the groceries in the bag only provide the context, the real interest is the fish and the sunset on the sea it sees through the window, the sea where it belongs but will never return to....

This is the original recording of "Una furtiva lagrima" by Enrico Caruso, 1904.

More making of pictures. I fixed the camera to my laundry cart which I used as a dolly for a camera pan, a technique that I do not recommend... I taped a ruler to the floor and pushed the cart along it half a cm for every frame. It's ghetto, but it works.

Full disclosure : I used/stole Sardine label graphics to create the end credits sequence  ;-D

Behind the scene pics in my kitchen. I had to recreate the interior of a fridge for one scene, because working "on location" was both inconvenient (turning off your fridge, defrosting the freezer...) and impractical (no easy access to animate the fish).

Some early tests : I quickly realized that I could not place the green screen too close to the fish because of its reflective scales...

The results are in :
Una Furtiva Lagrima will be participating in the official competition in ANNECY 2012 this summer!

The original song that gives the film its title is an italian Opera aria from "L'Elisir d'Amore". The version used in the film is the great Enrico Caruso's recording of 1904.