Features

$9.99: animation on a budget

$9.99Tatia Roisenthal’s Feature $9.99 cost a little more than the title suggests, but it was still a triumph of low-budget stop-motion passion. Miguel Gonzalez writes.

Tel Aviv-born, New York-based Rosenthal adapted two of Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s short stories, Breaking the Pig and Crazy Glue. Keret found a creative connection with Rosenthal and proposed they work together on a feature film script, which would combine several of his stories and centre them around an apartment building. Rosenthal received a U$100,000 production fund award from New York University, which she used to create A Buck’s Worth, a short promo for their feature project – which, despite being non location-specific, they thought would be produced in the US.

But the project would receive support from a very different source. In 2005, Australian producer Emile Sherman (Disgrace, Candy) was in Tel Aviv and got in touch with Keret, who showed him the script. Sherman then contacted Rosenthal and they saw the potential of the film as an Australian-Israeli co production, the first ever since the official treaty was signed in 1997.

Both pre production and the shoot were done in Australia. Post was done in Israel, due to the co-production structure, although Rosenthal would have been happy to do it with Fuel VFX, who provided acquisition and pipeline advice before the shoot.

Sherman doesn’t deny that the project was “very scary and exciting”, being his first animation feature and Australia’s first stop-motion feature (it was shot before Mary and Max), but he also found comfort in that exact same fact, and that very few features had been made internationally for that kind of budget ($4.5 million).

“We made the rules”, he explained. “Everybody was either experienced in animation or live action film, but not in both, so it was a process of discovery.

Contrary to the traditional practice of recording voices separately, the all-star cast (which boasts Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Joel Edgerton and Claudia Karvan) interacted in real time, including those based in Los Angeles. The story contains groups of characters, so the production scheduled three days of sessions to ensure that each group could act together, even if some of the actors had to be recorded long distance in real time via an internet connection, at Huzzah Sound in Sydney.

REALISTIC SURREALISM

The surreal characters – such as a cynical angel and a man willing to undergo a ‘bone extraction’ process for love – inhabit a hyper-realist world that is a far cry from the traditional ‘cartoony’ stop-motion puppets of international productions. Such realism suggests the film could have been live action, but Rosenthal believes the story chooses the medium and, in this case, stopmotion was ideal because of its conceptual qualities.

“The characters are symbolic rather than real. Combining real people and the effects that would have been needed to pull off the magic-realist elements, would’ve resulted in a film that wasn’t cohesive or had an internal integrity to it,” she explained.

With a team of nine animators working on the twelve movements per second required to create the illusion of movement, and each completing four to five seconds per day during the forty-week shoot, the film was shot with a Canon 30D digital still camera. Almost everything in the film was practical, except for the water elements and the opening scene, a wide shot with a sunrise, which were done in CG.

The evolution of $9.99’s silicone puppet design dates back to Crazy Glue, when Rosenthal sculpted puppets that were visually similar to her previous painting work. It continued to mature with A Buck’s Worth, and when $9.99 came along, she was ready to combine her sensibility with the expertise of others.

“I was able to develop the look even further because now I had at my disposal these people who were better puppet makers than me and had more mechanical ideas about how to make them move.”

Rosenthal believes $9.99’s innovations were making stop-motion “home made and affordable” and the way they approached puppet stocking.

“We used replacement mouths, which is a very traditional animation technique, but we combined it with hinged mouths so the chin could move up and down as we were doing it. I don’t know if it’s been done before to accommodate such a dialogue-heavy piece.”

Due to the expensive nature of stop-motion, Rosenthal admits she felt limited “every day” and although she’s quite pleased with the final product, there are certain moments where she didn’t get exactly what she was looking for.

“It would have been nice to have more than one take, or a more rigorous rehearsal for some shots.

“It was a very low-budget, 24×7 production. I would not sleep one or two days a week in order to catch up with work. I definitely want to make another film, to implement the professional advances I made personally while making this one. It’s too much knowledge to go to waste! But I would not want to do it for the same budget, and not without an assistant director.”

The most important thing she learned?

“Now I know that the sky is not going to fall down…”

$9.99 has been released in the US (limited), as well as France and Russia; so far its international box office stands at U$665,772. The film will be released by Icon in Australia, on September 17. ■

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