Chainsaw - an interview with Dennis Tupicoff

Earlier in the year I met Dennis Tupicoff at HAFF after having just seen Chainsaw his 2007 hybrid documentary film about love triangles, chainsaws and a legendary Australian bucking bull called Chainsaw.

Dennis is well know in Australian and internationally as an animator and director. He has made films that use live action, animation, fiction and documentary and “all of the above”. I was inspired by his film Chainsaw for it refreshing Australian humour, its poetry and seamless free associative story telling. It fascinated me that this was made by the same man who made His Mother Voice a documentary animation based on an audio recording and I was eager to chat to him about all things documentary, animation and archival material.

We recently on skype for a more in depth conversation and Dennis was also kind enough to take a look at a rough cut of Just The Two Of Us. It was a good time to show him having completed the animation and with the next stage being a sound mix and a grade. Dennis’s main response was for me to look at how to marry the quality of the audio to the images of the film. I was not quite satisfied about the flatness of the drawn characters and the colourful car. In one way I liked the contrast to the archival background but I think Dennis picked up on this difference and challenging me to think about it again. Discussing his films with him also made me appreciate the representation of depth and volume through his distinctive use of composition and silhouettes. Thinking about these ideas I found a new way to approach the flatness and to marry the quality of the sound with the quality of the picture by introducing a textured element to the film.

New grade test:

Rotoscoping is sometimes derided or seen as a lessor art form than cartoon drawing, that it is somehow cheating and not equal to the hand made craft of traditional animation. Dennis is a filmmaker who is not restricted by genre or dictated to by fashion or negative industry views. He reasons for using rotoscoping in His Mothers Voice was because it wanted it to be “removed from reality but move like reality.” And for Chainsaw it was because he wanted a style that fitted seamlessly with the Ava Gardner footage which he wanted to use untreated to show it’s raw emotion. He also was attracted to the rotoscoping as he felt it fitted with the adult themes of love, jealously and suicide in the film. This was interesting for me as I reflect on the choices I made in using rotoscoping. In my previous film I have used live action only as a reference for movement from which I drew only as a side by side guide. My first instinct was to use this technique again but the more storyboarding and design I did, the more rotoscoping seemed to fit the best  particularly when pictures are played in sync with an actual recording of a real life person. This is essentially a design choice. I prefer person like characters that have a strong connection to reality but this isn’t to say that a cartoon character would not work but I style I prefer. Coming from a very structured live action classical editing background I tend to construct my films very much using classic film language that fits well with the photographic language of rotoscoping. As an editor it is natural for me to use this screen language in animation design as well. Dennis has made films with both cartoon characters and real looking characters. Each film for him has a different design ideas to fit the different stories. 

Visually Dennis’s films are striking for there graphic qualities, there use of light and siluette and for the camera moves that somehow remind me of the way one interprets images in graphic novels. Dennis thinks that this is primarily because he is not a painter and because “the closer I am to black and white the more comfortable I am” and because it is a visual language he has developed that he finds simple and effective. Dennis says he was drawn to animation as “it was a type of film making that I could do on his own, I didn’t have any money… working with actors was a huge undertaking”  and jokingly he says “some how I thought animation was easier that’s how deluded I was” What he likes about animation is the way you can construct a story using motion, sound, design and nearly do exactly what you want. He says in terms of audience he has no idea where the place for it is when he starts. When he makes a film (every 3-5yrs) he says he usually gets to make it the way he wants filtered through a lot of control mechanisms where he has learnt what he can do, how much it costs to do certain things because he acts as his own producer along with co-producer Fiona Cochrane for the last 10years.

Dennis describes his film Chainsaw as “a fictional story wrapped around a whole lot of non-fiction”. It takes the audience on a ride where you don’t quite know where you are till 15 mins into the film. Seeing Dennis do this so well gave me a boost of confidence that I could make a film about a very small moment in time that doesn’t answer some of the questions it raises.

While my film changes the fact that all the letter takes place in the car (where only a small part of it actually took place there) I still see it as a documentary. Dennis’s film His Mothers Voice came out in 1997 challenged people ideas about genre and documentary first for it’s unusual structure (you hear the dialogue twice) and second for it’s interpretation of reality with the use of rotoscoping. Ironically His Mothers Voice was not selected for IDFA the year it was submitted even know it has the reputation of showing adventurous documentaries and know other documentary festival in the world programmed it either. However 10 years later IDFA included  His Mothers Voice in a retrospect of 50 animated documentaries starting from 1919 to the present so this shows that peoples idea’s of what a documentary is has certainly changed. Dennis thinks that audiences are more open to being challenged these days through exposure to visual story telling in music videos and advertisements but that long form films are in a way still archaic and could be more adventurous in the way they tell stories. Chainsaw was interesting for me because of the way it poetically moves between fiction and non-fiction. Dennis says that he sees Chainsaw as a lot of potential shorts films ‘slammed’ up against each other and that he has done this in a number of films (Darra Dogs, Dance With Death) and it is a way of writing that he is very comfortable with. Generally he thinks it is a post-modern world and that people are open to wilder ways of story telling. 

More information on Dennis @ www.dennistupicoff.com/

Reflections on OFFF Barcelona

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your project is to walk away from it for a while and come back with fresh eyes. Travelling to the OFFF festival in Barcelona was a opportunity to do this.  I went to over 10 different talks mostly about interactivity and how story telling works within this frame work. I came away with new knowledge and I reflected on how I miss the collaboration side of film making as I try to fill many roles in my graduation project. The conference being in one of the most beautiful and creative cities of the world I have been too also gave me a big injection of inspiration and encouragement to achieve my creative goals.

Some of the companies whose talks were of great interest were B-reel, UNIT 9 and on a individual basis Brendan Dawes who really stood out for his originality, playfulness and his passion for experimentation.

B-reel have a great philosophy on working with people from different back grounds which they believe helps creative thinking and has a huge influence on their work. While a lot of their work is interactive and design they are expanding and have just opened a documentary part of company. The company recognises that every body is a entrepreneur and also have room in their company for experimentation between projects which ones again feeds their creative environment. They often spoke about collaboration and I will be very interested to follow more work from this company. 

One of their large scale projects was weblab which was a collaboration between the London Science Museum (who provided the exhibition space and expertise in working with children), Tellart (who build the machines), B-reel, Universal design studio and Biblioteque (who did the interior design)  to make a experiment using HMTL5 where users from all over the world and visiters to the museum could interact exploring the web.

UNIT 9 started their talk with an interesting reflection on how web design has changed over the last 10 years. They looked at traditional menus, how we interact with the browser and scrolling with 2 fingers. It was interesting and revalent to me as I am in the middle or designing the interactivity side of What Love Sounded Like. They showed projects that tease the users to learn how to interact with the interface and reflected on how technology has changed now video works better then all the key frames that one had to do back to the 90s. They also talked about how we now view content on some many different devices and the challenge of making projects work across all devices.

I later spoke with Robert Bader from UNIT 9 for some advice on my project. First I asked him if he thought interactive films on the web was a good idea. He said it depends on what you are trying to do  and if I was doing more than asking people to press play?

I told him that I wanted to included extra material that does not fit in the film and to create a frame work for the film to be shown. I dont think I am re-inventing the wheel but what I am doing is similar to making a DVD menu with extras and that the added advantage of being on the web gives me access to a broader audience and he agreed this was a good reason to experiment with the medium.

Another helpful idea was that he asked me also to think about the effects of people holding your film on a device and what that means physically to your project and what a smaller picture and potentially less sound quality might mean to the way the film is perceived on the web. I was also encouraged that some of their big projects are not aimed at all devices but just to work well on a browser and as I am working on this alone and with not much time I think that if it works on a browser I am happy with that for now with scope to adding hand held devices later.

Brendan Dawe's is a dynamic member of the information visualization community. His talk was fun and enageing. He aims for people to love or hate his work and thinks the worst thing is have no reaction. He has a passion for collecting things and that incudes data. I think the beauty in his work is the way he manages to add a narrative to his projects as he says "data by itself is not enough, data needs poetry". He shared his experiments and side projects which eventually seem to trickle into his contracts and paid commissions. He has a curious mind and likes to experiment. Some of his experiments included controlling video play back by manipulating playdoh (I am not sure if this was a joke!), building a machine which collects and prints tweets where people are tweeting about being happy, a small box which shows the weather in symbols and the iphone peg. I found him interesting because he works both in software and in hardware. Essentially in ideas and concrete things that you can hold in your hand.

He was able to show the path of his interests and how they feed his work. How he worked out the mathematics of the sunflower in an early experiment that later was used in his work with a telco in the UK as they launched the 3G network. This project collected tweeted data over a 3 day period and acted like a stamp in time. The data was represented in spiral shapes of the sunflower and useing colour to show the grouped themes such us when hurrican Sandy occurred or when Obama was visiting London.  It had an eerie effect as well by showing that while people tweeted about big events a day later no body talks about it. I am fascinated as how you can tell stories with data in a visual and creative way. I am not sure what it means for my work in editing and animation except that it is another way of visualizing story and meaning and I am attracted to the way these data visualisers show us another way of looking at the world. 

A common tips from serveral people including Brendan at the conference was making wire frames or sketching in grayscale. This helps to get to the essence of the composition or the work flow in interactive design and is also a great way to communicate to clients with out the distractions of colour or other details. 

Some of Brendans references included the legend title designer Saul Bass and also a scene from Vertigo where the characters are looking at a ancient 2000 yr old tree which had markers in it showing major historical events. He used Saul Bass as inspiration in visual design and the Vertigo clip as a intellectual idea about marking time and how this can be translated to collecting data from rss feeds and APIS on the net which gives you are snap shot of what is happening in the world at any given moment.

He began and ended his talk with his love for collecting music and sounds. Closing the talk by showing how he made a 3D print of the data of a Daft punk song. Why? because "it was fun, to see what would happen and because nobody would die".

Reflecting on listening to the company talks and visiting a animation studio I remembered how much I love collaborating and working in a creative space with other makers and how I would like this as a later goal having moved to Holland and closed my studio in Sydney. Reflecting on the animation festivals I have been to this year also makes it clear to me where my interests lie and where I feel I fit creatively in the Film and TV industry and that is as an editor/animator film maker within a strong leaning to the field of documentary.

sketching the inspiring La Pedrera designed by Catalan Antoni Gaudí