< BACK
Bob Sabiston sits attuned assiduously to his computer
screen, his left hand tapping keys on the keyboard while his
right hand moves a pen across a Wacom tablet resting in his
lap. The pen is pressure sensitive, creating thicker and
thinner lines depending on the urgency of the pen stroke. He
also has a color palette, and deftly chooses minor gradations
of color, seemingly painting, but through the computer. It's
an amazing tool, and one that earlier animators like Ralph
Bakshi might have killed for.
The history of animation in the United States is a mixed
one, with stellar achievements highlighting almost every
decade since the beginning of cinema in 1896. However, unlike
the strong traditions of adult animation in Europe, Eastern
Europe and Asia, the US has generally looked down on
animation, considering it mere kids' stuff and making the
history of the animated feature for adults a slight one
indeed. Recent attempts to resurrect the tradition in the last
two decades include Bakshi's rotoscoped Cool World in 1992,
which played with the line separating real and animated
characters, but in general, independent filmmakers, faced
already with steep obstacles in terms of distribution, have
stayed away from the format.
That's beginning to change, and leading the way are artists
like Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallotta, who are part of a larger
movement not so tightly bound to the strictures of realism
that determine so much contemporary filmmaking. And because
they happen to be working at this particular moment, when so
many of the traditional rules about filmmaking are changing,
they might have a chance at changing what we consider proper
adult entertainment.
Looking Back
"Around three years ago, I made a simple program for
tracing," explains Sabiston, a quiet man who speaks with
intensity. "It only took two weeks to do, but each time that
I've used it for a project, it's gotten more complicated. Now
it's getting to be very a solid application." The computer
whiz has always combined his interests in programming,
painting and animation, but in 1997, he had the good fortune
to run into Tommy Pallotta, an Austin-based filmmaker who'd
studied philosophy and filmmaking, written and directed a
feature, and was looking for a new way to make films. "I told
him I was really interested in animation," explains Pallotta,
"and he was into filmmaking. I was sharing a studio with a
designer at the time, and I invited Bob to move in."
The collaboration between Pallotta and Sabiston began in
full when they set out on a road trip later in 1997 with a DV
camera in hand. Along the way, the pair conducted informal
interviews with anyone who was interested. Then they returned
to Austin, digitized the footage and invited a bunch of
artists (who had absolutely no animating experience) into
their studio to learn how to use the animation software. The
result was Road Head, which screened in the 1998 RESFEST
program and immediately gained the filmmakers a devoted
following. At once realistic, with wisps of perfectly captured
human movement, and yet wholly imaginative, the film is filled
with wildly divergent drawings that at times perfectly
underscore a speaker's attitude, and at others illustrate
spirited flights of fancy.
When asked what makes their animation technique different
from traditional rotoscoping, Pallotta is direct. "Rotoscoping
is one of the oldest animation techniques—it was first
developed in 1917—but the thing that makes us different is
that we're not imposing rules on the animators. In traditional
animation, the animators are forced to follow a set of
guidelines. We don't work that way. Instead, we ask our
artists how they want to draw the people they're animating.
And our process really isn't dependent on the technology. What
we're doing could have been done in cell animation - not as
easily, of course. But most of the people that we work with
have little computer experience. They're painters, sculptors,
etc. We give this set of tools to people and ask them what
they want to do with it."
That said, the fundamental process developed by Sabiston is
similar to rotoscoping, which simply entails tracing in some
manner a frame of film taken from a segment of moving images.
The process in the past has allowed animators as disparate as
Max Fleischer and Walt Disney to lend very human-like
movements to obviously non-human characters like Snow White.
However, much rotoscoping ends up seeming mechanical—it's
almost too realistic, and somehow, by overcompensating, ends
up losing the fluidity that makes non-rotoscoped animation so
magical. Sabiston and Pallotta's films, however, don't have
that mechanical edge, and the energy of their films does not
derive from slavish recreation, but from the artistic
interpretation of and extrapolation from the images they're
tracing.
The pair's next effort was Snack and Drink in 1999, which
follows an autistic boy to a 7-Eleven; Figures of Speech
followed in 2000. Here again, Sabiston and Pallotta are
interested in slice-of-life portraits, each of which melds
personal revelation with very divergent animation styles. And
as always, the array of visual accompaniments is amazing as
they paint people's lives, making each person literally a
figure of speech. Facial expressions and gestures become the
foundation for elaborate visual constructions that both
interpret and augment the stories, somehow defamiliarizing the
familiar, and urging viewers to listen to these voices in a
new way. Needless to say, widespread festival acclaim ensued,
and if that wasn't enough, Sabiston and Pallotta also earned
accolades from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which
made Snack and Drink a part of its permanent collection.
Waking Life
Given that Sabiston and Pallotta had worked thus far in the
more documentary mode, how did a feature film collaboration
with Rick Linklater come about? In part, it was a matter of
timing. Pallotta had worked on Linklater's Slacker in the
early 1990s while a student at the University of Texas ("I was
Rick's TA,") and the two had stayed in contact within the
closely-knit Austin film community. Linklater was also aware
of Sabiston's animation software. Initially, the three hoped
to work on a TV series similar to the conversation-based Road
Head. But after several frustrating months, the whole thing
fell through. "In television, animation has expanded a lot,"
says Pallotta, "but there's still a close-minded attitude.
People are worried that animation is for kids only, and don't
really recognize that adults can enjoy it too."
Linklater liked the idea of an adult-oriented animation,
and he gave Pallotta and Sabiston a copy of a script that he'd
written several years earlier. "It was one that had been
swimming around in my head for years," says Linklater, "and I
decided that this animated look was the right vibe for it. It
also seemed to be a natural segue to go from the documentary
bits that Bob and Tommy had been doing to the movie that I had
in mind, which has a lot of characters, each with a different
personality. I also really loved the idea of a handheld
animated film—I've never seen anything like that before."
"It's also an idea based movie," explains
Sabiston, "and I
think Rick felt that it needed something extra." The
Independent Film Channel and Thousand Words provided
financing. "Both companies are very interested in working with
maverick filmmakers," says Pallotta. "They knew we weren't
going to make Toy Story 3 and they also know Rick's films. We
never really felt any pressure to make something for a broad
audience."
Linklater and Pallotta took care of the film shoot. They
began production in August 1999 in the 110-degree Austin sun,
prompting some worries about the stamina of the equipment. The
filmmakers took turns shooting handheld, with a sound person,
a location person and a PA rounding out the minimal crew. They
used TRV-900s and a Sony PC1. "The PC1 is the really small
camera, which enabled us to get a lot of weird crane shots by
putting the camera on a sound pole and extending it 12 feet,"
explains Pallotta. "It's also all handheld—that's one of the
things that we've always gone for. Traditional animation is
kind of stagnant because the frame doesn't move."
The footage in Waking Life is in almost constant motion,
and even though the film looks very non-real in the sense that
it resembles a moving painting rather than a photograph, it
still has the specifically human movements and gestures that
most animation lacks. "In a Pixar film, the people aren't
acting against each other," explains Pallotta. "They're shot
separately, and that works on viewers in a subconscious way—we
know it's not real. But our animation seems very realistic,
even more than the photorealism that other animators are going
for. What you see on screen looks 3-D, and has very real
qualities, but if you look at our stuff, it's really very
expressionistic." When asked how that quality comes through,
Pallotta explains that it's due to the ability of each of the
artists on the animating team to not only capture the right
gestures, but to augment them as well.
Pallotta and Linklater wound up with over 40 hours of
footage that they needed to get into a computer. "We hooked up
700 gigs of hard drive space," says Pallotta, and adds that
the film was edited throughout the fall. "No one had really
done that at that time, and so we spent a couple of weeks
experimenting. People kept asking why we didn't use an Avid,
but I liked the idea of working on a Macintosh, and I really
like the notion of Final Cut Pro. With the Avid you have this
system that's so expensive, and I felt like supporting the
concept that gives people the ability to edit at home. For us,
using digital video, staying in the computer and then using
Bob's program seemed perfect. Plus, there are so many steps in
our process. It's really like making two movies. You have all
the regular problems with production, and then you have to
animate it. So it was also about simplifying the process. Now
we can shoot, edit, animate and output from the same
computer."
Take Two
The next step was the animation process, which basically
meant making a second feature film altogether. The process
began last February with a team of 30 animators. "We cast the
animators to the actors," explains Sabiston. "We did try-outs,
and sometimes people really clicked with the characters."
Linklater concurs. "When it was right, you really knew it."
Each animator followed his or her character through the
film, using a trademark style that would help keep that
character's identity clear. There are 60 or so vignettes in
the film, and 60 characters, so there were plenty of
opportunities for the aesthetic to shift scene by scene.
Assigning characters to animators differs slightly from what
Sabiston and Pallotta have done in the past, when different
animators would animate the same character, creating an array
of looks for a single person. However, with a feature film,
clarity and consistency gained importance, and while the film
still boasts an eclectic array of looks, keeping track of the
disparate characters is not a challenge.
The collaboration among these three artists, each bringing
a different set of skills to the process, is a very physical
emblem of the kinds of convergence that characterize the most
interesting filmmaking projects today. And the result speaks
for itself.
From www.res.com
<
BACK