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WILLARD |
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official Willard site |
Nirvan directed the animation for the title sequence to Willard, a film about rats starring Crispin Glover.
watch title-sequence 11.2 MB requires quicktime: click above image to view © 2003 New Line Productions _____________________________________________________________________ director notes: I asked my friend Jonathan Silsby to build our zombie rat, who Jonathan named 'Larry.' Larry was made from a real rat that Jonathan found dead in a downtown Los Angeles alley. Jonathan skinned the rat and carefully put thin gauge aluminum wire inbetween the bones to convert it into a stop-motion puppet. The delicate puppet was then animated by Cameron Baity. That red book in the background is Crispin 'Hellion' Glover's "Rat Catching." We thought it would be a nice detail to include... we had black ink spill over the letters in his name so that it said: "Crispin Hell lover." The animation we did for Willard was completed in two weeks, including the building of the sets. The project lasted from 12/4/02 to 12/20/02. The concept was to create a basement that would be a metaphor for Willard's mental-state. The idea was to have things slowly get stranger as the camera travels further into the walls of the space. We used anti-gravity effects to make things seem strange- for instance, water leaking from rusty pipes (dripping up toward ceiling), there are actually drips of water that lead the camera up toward the vent, but they were lost due to poor post-production planning (we were also given the wrong aspect ratio to shoot in- so a lot of detail around the edges was cropped off)... there is also a puddle of water on the roof that turns into rust, rat like creatures moving beneath the insulation, and ash from an urn drifting up... Our responsibilities included fleshing out the concept into actual shots designing the shots, building the set, lighting, designing the camera moves, and animating. We were hired by the Picture Mill, who was hired by New Line. We were not responsible for any of the editing, compositing, or post-production... which we would have done differently. I never saw this theatrically, but someone on my crew said that the footage we deliveded was pretty poorly transfered and looked highly digitized. If so, this was an artifact introduced during a rushed post-production. So it goes... It was still a pretty fun job, and we were happy to get some stop-motion up on the big screen. |
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