Filmmaker
Bio
Philosophy-student-turned-animator,
Nirvan attempts through animation to create small perfect moments
no matter how long they take him to make. This has left him with four
animated short films: 'Fish Eye Guy & Why the Trees Died,' 'The
Three of Us,' 'The 1 Second Film,' and 'The Box Man.' Nirvan
graduated CalArts with an MFA in Experimental Animation and currently
lives in a box in Los Angeles.
The
Idea
My
film is inspired by Kobo Abe’s 1974 novel, The Box Man,
which I first read in 1996. I unintentionally thought of my version
four years later. I hadn’t meant to deviate from the original,
but over time I simply forgot a lot of the details and invented others.
When I went back and reread the novel, I was surprised at how I had
changed things, but in a good way; the story accidentally became my
own.
I
story boarded the film during my first week at CalArts for Mark
Osbourn's stop-motion class. We were to board a simple
idea that could be completed in two weeks. I ended up working on "the
three of us" for the class that year, but kept developing
The Box Man. I felt the idea deserved more time than two weeks
and ended up taking almost two years (I spent three weeks filming
the opening shot alone).
The
Production
I
shot The Box Man while at CalArts. Studio time was limited to 2 weeks
per semester, so getting the 20 weeks I ended up using took some doing.
Once I even paid a student fifty bucks for their shooting time.
Sharing
a studio meant having to break down elaborate setups after not having
slept for a few days. There was rarely time to develop film and see
if a shot had come out before having to break down a set. Near the
end of the production, I had already graduated and no longer had official
access. I was sneaking into spaces and borrowing equipment to get
my last shots done.
Several
shots that I did were pushing the limits of what I could do as a student;
I was using every inch of track, sometimes combining two shooting
spaces into one, and using the entire two weeks just to get one extravagant
shot.
The film
took a year and a half to complete. I also started to make THE
1 SECOND FILM during this time; It seems like I was working
non-stop. Because I was never under any deadline, I often wandered
down endless trails of perfectionism. Spending three days carving
miniature egg crate foam to line the inside of a gun box that was
on screen for about 8 frames. I definitely lost my mind at some point.
The
Lucky FotoKem Grant
Getting the FotoKem student grant was a lucky break. I was in FotoKem’s
lobby and overheard an employee describing the grant to a USC teacher.
This was a new grant being offered to every local film school. It
would pay for lab fees all the way to the answer print. I found out
that CalArts had not heard of the program. So I brought the grant
to my school’s attention. An entire year went by and nothing
happened with the grant. Meanwhile, I had finished building my sets
and was ready to start filming. I made follow up calls to FotoKem,
got updates about the grant, and forwarded them to my school. I kept
pestering the administration until ultimately they just gave me the
grant so that it didn’t go unused.
Having
the grant allowed me to shoot on 35mm. It also changed the way I could
work because I no longer had to worry about minimum processing fees,
which add up in animation. Usually I would have to wait until I’d
shot a hundred foot roll of film before processing, which could be
three weeks of shooting, but now I could break off each shot when
I was through, even if it was only a few feet, and see if it turned
out before breaking down an elaborate set. Which is really the way
to go if you can afford it, and suddenly I could.
Technical
Details (High Def Film Transfer)
Though originally shot on 35mm, the film was transferred to High Def
for post-production and then went back out to film from the digital
files. The 1920 x 1080 digital files were stored on a Western Digital
80G Firewire Drive and taken to home computers. Once the film was
in the digital realm, we (Benjamin
Goldman and Jamie
Caliri) used After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and Photoshop to fix
mistakes and polish the film in ways that an optical printer could
not have done. I can't give Jamie and Benji enough credit for the
work they put in, they spent hundreds of hours to make their labor
invisible, they fixed camera bumps, out of focus shots, lighting problems,
screen direction, animation, color timing, editing and lots of other
stuff in ways that no one will ever notice. Once the film was polished,
we went back out to film courtesy of Mike Broderson and David Rosenthal
at FotoKem’s Digital Division, who donated services not covered
by FotoKem’s Student Grant.
Because
I started on film, we were able to keep the image quality very high,
much higher than if we had started with High Def.
The
Music (and Charlie Musselwhite)
I saw
Charlie Musselwhite at a concert when The Box Man was still in its
early stages. I felt a similarity between the hollow atmosphere in
my film and the way Charlie played harmonica on Mule Variations. After
the show I asked Charlie if he would consider working on an animated
student film. I was very excited when he said yes. Most people wonÕt
even recognize that the music in the film is coming from a harmonica,
which I think is cool. Charlie can play harmonica in unconventional
ways, which is what I was trying to do with animation. He was very
generous with his time, incredibly modest and a real honor to work
with.
Personal
Statement
I've always
liked the idea of 'perfect moments' in animation; the compressing
of so much time and effort into small moments. My favorite part of
animation is the process, the things that happen in-between the frames
that no one ever sees. There is something about the invisibility of
the labor that is attractive to me. Often I will lose track of time
and spend hundreds of hours to make a few seconds of film.
The Box
Man is different for me in that I tried to focus on basic story telling.
I was also trying to use stop-motion in a very realistic way to create
a sense of alienation; so that the world has a sense of reality but
there is something not quite right about it. The film is in part about
isolation, as was the process of making this film.
As a fine
art form, animation is relatively obscure and there still seems a
great deal of room for individuals to create their own voice. Perhaps
because the medium has yet to reach a wide audience in noncommercial
ways.
