Already hard at work on another music video, stop motion animator Peter Sluszka of Dancing Diablo took a few minutes to talk with VFXPro about working with Michel Gondry on the knit-by-hand, "Walkie Talkie Man."
This was the most fun I've had working on something in a long time.
Why?
The look of it and the uniqueness of it was fun. Typically with stop-motion, you end up using either foam latex or clay -- this was working with very different materials.
It was fun to be shooting some Pixelation -- which means essentially stop-motion animation with real live people. You pose them, and then take the still frame.
I also enjoyed working with a Bolex.
What is special about the Bolex camera?
It is a 16mm camera. They are very easy to use, very lightweight. They are great if you are running around, trying to do a lot of different setups. Very versatile and they give you a nice look.
Kind of nostalgic, too. A lot of people have done student or independent work with a Bolex. Especially now, with everything becoming so digital, it is really rare to work on a job with it. It is nice to have a film camera -- kind of a tactile thing.
Did you do the setups in Partizan's studios?
Yes, they have studio space in New York now. Enough space so that we were able to build a live-action set. One room was entirely transformed to make the music studio and recording booth. It was a fun set to be on. I don't think anyone wanted to rip it down.
They had another couple of rooms where there was a production office and a shoot room -- a stop-motion room where we had the miniature set. That is where we shot the bulk of the character animation.
The character animation is primarily the giant?
Exactly. And then there were things like the helicopter and little cars. In that set, even the trees were moving. Everything was breathing a little bit.
Does Dancing Diablo have its own studio?
Yes.
And you do stop motion there?
We do all kinds of animation. Stop motion, cel, CG. Stop motion is what I enjoy doing the most. I like it because it incorporates character and set design. It is not always just doing the animation.
Is there enough of it going on to keep you busy?
There has been lately -- a lot of kids shows.
How did you get into stop motion?
I took a class in it at the School of Visual Arts. I have a longstanding interest in painting and sculpture and storytelling, and it was a natural medium to bring all of those interests together. It incorporates everything from design to modeling to sculpting to scenic work. As well as conveying a storyline or portraying a character. It seemed like the best of all worlds -- a way to combine those interests and not have to shut anything out. It is nice -- because every job is so different.
Did you found Dancing Diablo?
The founder is Beatrice Ramos, and when she was starting it up she asked some people that she had worked with if they wanted to partner with her. We had worked in the same circles.
How long has the company been around?
A little more than two years. Currently, the company is doing the background coloring for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," which is a good steady gig. We do other jobs as they come.
How did you get involved in this project?
I got a call -- they had heard my name a couple of times. I gave them my reel, and that was it.
How big was the miniature set?
The set for the exteriors was four feet by eight feet. The character was somewhere between eight and ten inches tall.
It was supposed to be Los Angeles. We built little insert areas on that set and rearranged them as need be, so we had more room and could cheat the perspective at times.
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Was that set created by the production designer?
The art department on this job worked around the clock. They worked as hard as I have ever seen anyone work. There was so much fabrication to do. A lot of sewing and crocheting. Everything you see from the Marshall stacks to the guitars to the miniature set -- it all had to be handcrafted.
What was your role on a nitty gritty level?
Principal character animator -- posing and photographing the central character -- Walkie Talkie Man.
What is he made of on the inside?
He had a wire and wood armature and he was stuffed with cotton filling. On that last shot where he is coming entirely unraveled, we had to destroy the model.
It is a one of a kind model, so it is different than when you have a mold and you can just cast characters as you need them. In this case, the character had to be made from scratch -- there was no getting around that. So, we made sure we got all of our other shots done before we wrecked it.
There were no different sizes of the character?
No, that character was all shot in one scale, and then it cuts to puppeteering when the hand crashes through the window.
There was so much yarn to animate. You can see the yarn animating out of the singer's mouth, for example. That is an example of pixelation. That meant tucking yarn in this poor guy's mouth and having him hold the mouth position while his head was laying against Plexiglass so that we could lay the yarn flat. For something like that we would set up the camera and shoot it as a down shot.
He was amazingly good-natured -- we were shoving mohair in his mouth. It could not have been pleasant for him. But it came out really cool.
We were animating pieces of string to make patterns and soundwaves. It was not pure character animation, there were a lot of weird and unique situations that called for some experimentation.
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Can you talk about some of the experimentation that you did?
It is a little hard to describe some of the things we were experimenting with. It was a very mathematical process -- forming different patterns with string. Each color of yarn represents a different musician.
For example, there is a shot of the drummer. He is hitting the cymbal and you see the gold thread it is made of unspooling abstractly, like a soundwave. The other colors are red for the singer, blue for the guitarist.
The idea was thoroughly fleshed out. As in, Michel wanted to create this yarn universe. And as goofy and as far out as it is, there was actually some consistency and a strange logic to the whole thing. When you record on the yarn it became knotted. Very interesting abstract ideas.
When there is yarn floating through the air, was that always shot using Plexiglass?
Yes, we did quite a few shots like that.
Had you done shots like that before?
Yes, it is an old trick. It has to be angled and lit correctly so that you do not catch reflections.
It is kind of an animation standby. Some people have done really complex things with it using multiplanes, where they are getting depth of field on multiple planes of glass. In this case, it was fairly simple but effective.
There were also a couple shots where we wired the yarn up, because there was no other way to make the shot work.
You wired it from the ceiling?
No, we coiled really thin wire around the yarn itself. Especially using something like Mohair that has a lot of fuzz and a lot of texture to it, it hides it pretty well.
It is kind of high-concept low-tech. An old-fashioned sense of craft -- everything from the camera to using tricks like shooting through glass rather shooting against a greenscreen or a bluescreen.
How about towards the end when the singer's body starts to come apart?
That was puppeteering. There was a platform that acted as a fake floor and that had a hole in it. His body was underneath. His torso was sticking out and he was laying back and we had a fake, stuffed pair of jeans and sneakers. We used heavy-gauge armature wire so we could keep a bend in the knee. I was just underneath the camera with my hands grabbing the feet on the dummy legs, and then someone else came in and puppeteered the yarn arm that was swiping at the singer, and they rolled camera.
There is a scene where you see his guts coming out and that is pixelated too -- Michel wanted to shoot that one himself. He likes to get in there and have fun. He is the camera operator in the video.
Can you explain what happens when the guts come out?
The art department made these goofy entrails that were stuffed under his shirt, and his blood was made of yarn. It was a matter of moving his digestive track around, as if it were squiggling about as more blood came out, and then posing Tyson, the lead singer, making him hold, shooting a frame, going in and animating all the yarn and guts again and posing him again.
Did you enjoy working with Gondry?
Yeah, it was great. He was really nice and that created a fun atmosphere to work in. The people that he was working with that were there through Partizan were incredibly devoted to getting the project done.
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