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/
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