The title of this post is the title of a stop motion feature film created here, in Australia, Written and Directed by Adam Elliot; creator of the well known short film titled 'Harvey Crumpet'. First I'll give a brief description of the film before explaining the unique way I managed to gain a ticket for the first public screening in Perth.
Mary and Max is a dark comedy portraying the life of two people at opposite ends of the who, under quite childish curiosity circumstances, become pen pals. It's based loosely on a true story of Elliot and his own pen friend. Mary is an 8 year old school girl from Melbourne, and Max is a 44 year old overweight Jewish man with Aspergers syndrome from New York. Through out the course of two decades Mary and Max write to each other, each letter seeming to spark some sort of scenario; both characters learn from each letter and as they grew older, the friendship grew greater albeit from many bumps and spikes along the road.
I had the privelage of helping create a short ten second stop motion animation for the opening of the night, with help from Daniel, Crystal and Ebbie. The presenter from the ABC had requested it specifically asking that it was made to look very bad, or "crappy" if to quote everyone. So we set out to deliberately make this stop animation crappy, the morale of it is stop motion isn't an easy type of animation to create and present. The ABC Presenter pretended for it to be his own creation that took him 2 weeks to complete (2 days for us), but in the end we were given an honorable mention for taking up the role. Thus, Crystal, Daniel and I each received an 'Admit 2' pass for the first screening of Mary and Max in Perth. It couldn't have felt any more Awesome to help in the presentation of an even more Awesome stop motion animation!
At the end of the screening there was a Q&A session with Adam Elliot himself along with Melanie Coombs who took up the Producer role of Mary and Max. Elliot explained before the screening that everything visible in the film was hand made and that there was debate that the animators would digitally create the rain, water, fire, and smoke animations; in the end it was settled that they would stick with the primitive method of just using physical products in the stop motion aspect. I couldn't help but put my hand up and ask how they did the smoke animation as it was the one separate of water and fire that eluded me the most, looking so realistic. It was a little complicated in description from Elliot as to how it worked, they ended up using a sort of white wire with a particular clear product, fading it out slightly and just bending it each picture as you would anything else in stop motion; The end result looking excellent.
That pretty much covers my night, unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to the screening of the WAM Bam competition animations; something I'm very upset about. There just wasn't enough time to make it down to Fremantle. Hopefully I'll be able to see the end result at school on Wednesday. Ciao!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
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