Cockroach: CGI on a bug-sized budget
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, re-imagined as a romantic fantasy and produced for $20,000? An unlikely but very real scenario for director Luke Eve, who had to find a way to deliver it.
Raen Fraser’s script Cockroach, about a man who dies on his wedding day and is reincarnated as the above-mentioned insect, desperate to get the attention of his widow, is one of the three winners at the second John Jameson Productions competition.
As part of the whiskey company’s screen initiative, execution of the short film was commissioned to More Sauce’s producer Christopher Seeto and director Luke Eve, whose short Australian Summer won at Tropfest 2005.
Seeto and Eve were given $20,000 and the freedom to make creative decisions. But Cockroach is the kind of story that, while short and sweet on paper, it is nothing but in terms of the production challenges it implies.
“The two biggest things were, how do we get a post house on board, and how do we contain the story?” explained Eve. “We tried to condense the script a little, but it ended being about the same length because it was the natural length of this story and what it needed.”
The director recruited the talents of Damon Gameau to star as Charlie, but he is only on screen in one scene. Having someone dress up as a cockroach the rest of the time was not an option, so the filmmakers had to find a post-production partner willing to deliver a high quality CGI character for a very low budget.
According to Ian Dodman, VFX supervisor at Postmodern, working on a character-driven project was one of the mean incentives for the company to join the project. The Sydney-based company has done all the post except the sound.
“We’re almost doing it all as a pro-bono activity, fitting it in with our current work and assigning all the resources we can,” said Dodman. “Because the character is in nearly every shot of the film, it’s almost comparable to a feature film in terms of the amount of work. We’ve done features before (Daybreakers, Knowing), and this is the most work we’ve done on a project, it’s a massive undertaking.”
Postmodern was also involved in the design of the Charlie character. Eve wanted a realistic cockroach instead of a cartoonish version, so the team started collecting images of cockroaches. The challenge was to give the character a certain human quality.
“A realistic looking character would help our plight to get people really engaged and empathise with him,” Eve explained. “That can be done as long as he’s got some human characteristic that we could relate to, so the biggest things were the eyes, the mouth and the antennae. There’s so much expression in the eyes.”
With more than 80 VFX shots for only 11 minutes of footage, the workload was such that, one month before the late October 2009 premiere of the Jameson shorts, Eve realised the deadline was not realistic unless they compromised the animation.
“Instead of pushing ourselves and jeopardising the quality, we decided to go ahead with half the film and use that as a trailer,” said Eve.
Although there was never a plan to turn Cockroach into a feature, during the post-production process Eve started contemplating the potential of Charlie’s story to become something bigger – and he certainly has had his share of directing short films, which is why he’s got several feature and television projects in development, such as the sitcom New & Used.
In the meantime, Cockroach will premiere on March 29 and will start screening at the national and international festival circuit.
The Jameson competition is calling for entries until March 28 at www.johnjamesonproductions.com.au.
