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too small town

Commentary:
• conception
• building stuff
• puppets and stop motion
• shooting the film
• the drawn sequences
• the notebook sequence
• hindsight

Click here to view a gallery of behind-the-scenes pictures from Too Small Town.

Screenings:
• 2009 South Beach International Animation Film Festival
• 2009 Singapore International Film Festival, out-of-competition
• First Take, June 2009

conception

"Beauty is everywhere. It is the artist's job to reveal it."

Too Small Town - where to begin.

I know what inspired the film - the feeling that many people don't appreciate the fleeting moments of beauty that are all around us, every day, all the time. I cannot tell you, though, exactly how the film came to evolve into the version you see onscreen, because it was such a mild, gradual process. I can tell you it began with an image of a person on a train, soliloquising about the beauty of the journey that so many people miss because they are so focused on the destination.

Somehow, that insight became a grandfather's parting gift to his aspiring artist grandson Rory, who was obsessed with going to Florida to paint. That version included John, a close friend of Rory, who talked Rory out of his indecision in an extended conversation scene. It felt far too verbal and not visual enough - I suppose I was afraid that the audience wouldn't understand, and needed me to explain the meaning of my film to them. When I decided to make the film silent, the conversation got cut out.

My reason for making the film silent was purely selfish: I wanted to minimise external influences on the film as much as possible, and since I'm not a voice actor, I made it a silent film. I still feel it turned out very well, limited mainly by technical restrictions, but I always worry that I made it too personal, too much from my point of view, and that no one else will understand it.

Making the film silent did have the added benefit of tightening the film visually - it would have to be, since the image has to - and should! - do at least as much communicating as the words. It also meant that only scenes essential to the plot remained. This, I think, made the film a bit too short for casual viewing (a typical unit of action in a film lasts about five minutes), but I think the film still has important things to say.

building things

On this film more than any other film, my Theatre Studies and Drama experience came in handy. I had the image of what I wanted to achieve in my head, but building the set, creating the puppets - those were daunting tasks. Fortunately, having had the privilege of watching my TSD classmates build miniature sets and craft puppets proved immensely useful, because I was at least familiar with the decisions and considerations involved in stagecraft. Puppets, in particular, are not easy to build, and I wouldn't even have considered using them, let alone know how to build them, if I hadn't seen my classmates do it.

From the beginning, the production was an exercise in doing as much with as little money as possible. The sets were designed so that going from the shop scene to the room scene would require only a repainting of the walls. The two scenes use completely different angles, so it's not obvious that they're the same room. The tourist's backpack was my handphone pouch, stuffed with cotton filling and turned upside down. The road you see in the street is in fact emery cloth. The tourist is a reincarnate of the manager; after finishing the scene with the manager, I performed a little plastic surgery on him. The tourist is wearing a green vest because I ran out of green clay and neded to obscure the fact he is essentially wearing a sleeved halter top. The felt needed for the vest, in itself, was reused from a failed attempt at creating grass.

The cost of the film in its entirety: S$220.30 (including failed experiments).

Air-dry clay, moulded into shape, ready to be shipped to the store.

Shelves, in the middle of painting. Each shelf measures at approximately 4" by 2" by 4".

This is what I like to call the gaffa view - the stuff, away from the camera, that you never get to see - but is absolutely instrumental to holding the scene together. I love it.

puppets and stop motion

It took a long time for me to get the hang of stop motion. Movement, gravity, the laws of physics are all things we take for granted. There is a certain rhythm and form to our actions, and finding that rhythm was a challenge. When someone flings up his arms in exasperation, does the action originate from his elbows or his shoulders? When he bows his head to think, how do his hands react? When a person turns around, does his body move and head follow, or vice versa? How much of this detail is essential to communicating the action?

If you look at the image above, for instance, the Manager (in blue) is leaning back. His head is down, his hands are up. Going from a neutral, standing position to the above position takes about 12 frames, or half a second. So you have to split the entire range of motion of both the head and the hands into 12 smaller movements - except the hands move a lot more than the head. The hands can begin moving at the same time or after the head, but cannot move before the head starts to move down (try it). Often I would be standing in my room, working out these little details and counting beats to figure out how many frames were needed. Those were some of the most restful, peaceful parts of the process.

One of the joys of working with masks and puppets - typically regarded by those used to realistic art as a horrific disadvantage - is that each portrayal, each interaction, is by necessity stripped to its rawest and most essential form. Look at the puppet of Rod from Avenue Q. The colour of the hair and the face and the form of his eyebrows tell you everything you need to know about the character. Even though no one goes about with eyebrows like that in real life, the asymmetry reveals the constant tension in the character and gives him a permanently startled, quizzical, almost troubled look.

The face does not need to change - the audience will perceive different things in the same face when it is put in different circumstances. This was famously proved in an experiment by Lev Kuleshov: he edited a short clip with shots of a plate of soup, a girl and a coffin, and a shot of Russian actor Ivan Mozzhukhin's following each object. The audience first believed he was hungry, then light-hearted, and finally grieving. In other words, the audience's perception of a shot is strongly affected by the shot that precedes it.

At one point in the making of the film, I troubled myself over how to create what I termed the Blackadder face.

I attempted to somehow translate that change in expression onto Rory's face when he sees the manager trying to talk him out of him vacation, but after studying the change in Rowan Atkinson's expression closely, I could not perceive there being much of a change in expression as much as a change in atmosphere: the circumstances of his character's situation had changed, and so the meaning of the expression had changed along with it. Form and structure in the hands of a perceptive director are more liberating than one would expect.

Formal issues aside, I also had to deal with practical challenges. In real life, balance and locomotion are two particular things we never think about. I probably should have known better than to create puppets with two legs. Guess what I realised not long after finishing the puppets - they couldn't stand, let alone walk! Notice that in the film, no character is ever shown moving his feet. I had to work around this limitation as best as I could while still communicating what was going on to the audience (how many films have you seen where the characters couldn't walk?)

The real reason why that big red beanbag is there?

Rory cannot stand on his own two feet. He's being propped up with wire legs. Easiest way to get around it without drawing attention to it - stick something legitimate in front of it.

Every single shot that required a standing or - horror of horrors - walking character had to be improvised, if not in terms of locomotion, then in terms of editing. That's the reason for some of the very strange cuts in the film - I was trying to show them moving, but trying to avoid showing them actually walking. On the upside, it contributed to the "room clearing" montage which was originally not meant to be what you see in the film, but the final version is, in my opinion, much better than the sequence of shots I originally came up with.

shooting the film

For the actual shooting, I used a Fujifilm Finepix camera with no useful manual controls. (There are quite a few frames with subjects out of focus.) At first, I couldn't get a consistent picture - the colour of the image would change from shot to shot, and I had no way of knowing how the shot would turn out each time. It was a problem with the power supply - I was using batteries. Switching to an AC power supply solved the problem.

The one advantage of the Fujifilm Finepix was that it had a higher resolution than I actually needed, which made framing the original shots easier than they might have been otherwise, given that I could not control the focus and depth of field. I could put the camera where I needed it, even if it meant taking in a very wide shot, and crop the frames later. Virtually none of the shots was framed in realtime, so that was one less thing that could go wrong.

Compare the following pairs of shots: the first is the frame that appears in the film, and the second is the original shot taken on the camera before cropping.

The angle on the Manager is poor, you can see the wooden block propping him up. Fortunately it's quite innocuous and not very noticeable. The second picture makes the block very obvious.

And one more pair:

drawn sequences

I knew from the beginning that the crux of the film would be the drawn sequences - the grandpa's notebook, and Rory's subsequent "mind's-eye" sketches. I also know I cannot draw.

Hence, carbon paper to the rescue, then a little GIMPing to create the individual frames that, when put together, make the image appear drawn.

Step 1: Print out the image to be sketched, stick it over carbon paper, trace outline onto drawing paper.

Step 2: With the help of the magic that is GIMP, remove the lines one by one, creating different versions of the image as you go along. For some perspective, this image below is #28, and the image above is #50, meaning there are over 20 different frames in between the two.

Step 3: After creating the different frames, stick them in an ancient video editor in the right order.

One of the very fun parts of this aspect of the filmmaking was the fact that since I was working backwards - beginning with the final picture and erasing lines in the reverse order - I had to figure out what an artist would sketch first and erase that last. The subject is usually drawn first, then the major background features, then the minor ones. It's good for the smaller details to be drawn somewhat slower - that way, it feels like the important parts of the sketch are drawn with sure strokes, while the rest of the details are "filled in".

For instance: the frame below is frame #6. In just 6 frames, the backpacker has already been drawn.

the notebook sequence

In the earliest incarnation of the film, the notebook sequence was an animation of what I termed the Infinity Train - a long, long train that the camera could look down, and as the camera moved backwards while the train travelled, the audience would get the impression of someone trying to still time, to stop it, and then he would see some of these faceless train passengers engage in some sort of private interaction: one passenger would read a book while another tried to look over his shoulder, another one would be breathing deeply while clutching a bouquet of roses, a third would be quietly nodding his head and tapping along to the rhythm on his music player.

I attempted this, but the results were very unsatisfactory, as you can see from the picture: this is the best of it.

The next thing I thought of that could be effective was the juxtaposition of an image and a word that would help transform the way you could look at that image. I tried to pick poignant images from the internet and attach a different meaning to them - for example, a painting of a playground, titled "Castle". The ideal medium would have been watercolour, but I couldn't satisfactorily work any of the pictures into an image that resembled watercolour. My next favoured option was a pencil or charcoal sketch, but I could not achieve that effect on the computer either.

Finally, despite having resisted employing additional help on this film, I enlisted the skills of my good friend Zhen Teng - I gave her the five images I wanted sketches of, and she promptly delivered in exchange for a lunch on me at New York New York. Her wonderful sketches are what you see in the film, and they work a lot more effectively than anything I could have produced myself.

hindsight

By far the thing that bothers me most about Too Small Town is the possibility that no one else might understand it. There is that one line, "Beauty is everywhere. It is the artist's job to reveal it", which, to me, is the crux of the film, and if you get it, the rest of the film falls into place. Otherwise, I'm not sure the film is very illuminating.

There is also the fact that because the film is so condensed, it really doesn't give the audience time to appreciate Rory's change of heart. The problem was, in my mind's eye, I saw the film in live action. You see things with a certain hue, a certain atmosphere, and it all helps you to understand why Rory takes the attitude he does at first, and how the paradigm shift helps him see things differently. However, because it was stop motion, I wanted to minimise the amount of time needed to convey anything. I think in some parts the film is sort of suffocated - parts that should have had more room and time to breathe.

Another issue is the nature of stop motion animating. This is my first stop motion film, and I needed to get used to many things - no things flying through the air, no foot lifting off the ground, no leaning over without support, etc. I imagined much of the film as a traditional continuity edit, and even when I storyboarded the film there were still about 7 or 8 separate shots to a scene. In practice this was virtually impossible, and I had to improvise many solutions while keeping editing in mind. Sometimes the improvisations made the film considerably better and tighter than they would have been otherwise, such as the "room cleaning" montage in the apartment. Other times they simply failed to have the impact I hoped they would have, particularly in the street scene.

What would I have done differently? Hmm. Nothing. Perhaps I'd have been a little more careful with the one scene in which Rory has to walk - I couldn't somehow time it right - but that aside, this is a film I needed to make when I made it. Sure, it would have been better if I'd made it as a more competent filmmaker, but I needed to learn what I learnt from this film at this point in my fledging career. It wasn't just the film aspect of it - writing the screenplay, working around film problems, dealing with technical issues, making directorial decisions - it was the motivational aspect. There were days when I rolled out of bed onto my film set and didn't want to get to work. Stop motion is lonely, tedious work. I learnt how to motivate myself, to get myself started during moments of great inertia, and to keep moving, keep working despite physical, technical and mental obstacles. In a way, it was stressful - and at the same time I'm a better, stronger person for having survived it. So, no - I wouldn't change a thing on the whole. I can always make a better film in the future, but learning processes can't be skirted. To me, that is the true value of having worked on Too Small Town.