It’s amazing what you can shoot with a Nokia N8 touch screen phone and a little ingenuity.
Wieden + Kennedy, London, teamed up with directing duo Sumo Science of Aardman Animations, Bristol, England, to prove that point last year, producing “Dot,” a stop-motion film that finds an itsy-bitsy girl–standing a mere 9 millimeters tall–on the run as her tiny world crumbles and threatens to consume her.
Shot entirely on a Nokia N8 outfitted with a high-powered microscopic device called a CellScope, the diminutive work earned a Guinness World Record for smallest stop-motion animation character in a film.
Having mastered the world of micro filmmaking, W+K and Sumo Science went big–really big–when it came time for their next collaboration, a recently-released film titled “Gulp.” Shot outdoors on an 11,000-square-foot section of beach, the film earned its makers another Guinness World Record, this time for world’s largest stop-motion animation set.
“Gulp,” clocking in at 1:30, features an average-sized man (pixilation artist William Todd) in the role of a weathered fisherman who goes out to sea in search of his daily catch only to be swallowed, along with his boat, by an enormous fish. Luckily for the fisherman, he is spit back out courtesy of a well-timed explosion.
Like its predecessor, “Gulp” promotes the Nokia N8’s still camera capabilities to 18-to-25-year-olds who are known to use their phones for photography purposes as well as entertainment, gaming and social networking. “The idea of the film was to show that the technology is there to be used in a number of ways, and this is a great example of how to use the N8’s 12 megapixel camera in unique way,” W+K creative Tom Seymour said.
Accustomed to hunkering down in the studio for days and weeks at a time, Sumo Science, which is made up of Ed Patterson and Will Studd, headed to Pendine Sands, a stretch of beach on the southern coast of Wales, to shoot “Gulp.” “It’s next to an army gun range, just to add a little tension,” Studd quipped.
Their crew included DP Toby Howell; three key animators; four sand animators; and more than a dozen volunteer animation students.
Shooting “Gulp” wasn’t a day at the beach–it was more like five days and one night. And, as is the case with stop-motion animation, it was a painstaking process, with 20 seconds of what you see on screen taking 16 hours to shoot.
Mother Nature The weather didn’t always cooperate. “Unfortunately, we had to contend with rain, gale force winds and rising tides, which were all working against us and made the whole production of the film even more challenging,” Seymour shared. “The weather was so bad for the first half of the shoot we had to postpone the night shoot.”
But stormy weather wasn’t necessarily a surprise given the location of the shoot. “Pretty much everything was anticipated,” Studd said. “We weren’t ready for the amount of sea spray, though, which clouded one of the lenses on the N8s the first day. Luckily, we used three, and the remaining two had usable images.”
The N8s were affixed to a crane that hovered anywhere from 15 meters to 42 meters above the set, which, as noted before, was a massive swath of sand that served as a canvas for the animators who manipulated it to create the fisherman’s world. While stencils were used to create sand birds, rakes were dragged across the sand over and over to mimic the look of a wavy ocean. Fish were composed of a mix of sand, driftwood and polystyrene. “We found full-scale sand fish to be too heavy and too delicate,” Studd said when asked why the fish weren’t made solely of sand, noting, “We didn’t have time to remodel between frames.”
Detail-oriented Seymour was impressed by the details Sumo Science integratef into the film. “For example, the buoys swinging on the side of the boat and the fishing nets made into puffs of smoke from the top of the boat–these intricate details make all the difference to me,” Seymour said. “Also, the unexpected and unplanned elements that we captured, such as the flying seagull when the Sumo Science credit is onscreen, make me smile. If you blink, you’ll miss it, but it gives you an idea of the height we had the Nokia N8s [at].”
Will Grove-White composed the folksy track accompanying “Gulp.” Known as “The Duke of Uke,” according to Seymour, Grove-White happens to own a ukulele shop right around the corner of W+K’s London office.
Jack Sedgwick of London’s Wave Studios did the sound design, incorporating everything from the lap of the ocean to the squawk of seagulls.
Currently, “Gulp” can be viewed on YouTube along with a “Making Of” film. “We’ve made it really easy for people to share ‘Gulp’ by integrating social icons at the end of the film,” Seymour pointed out.
As for whether “Gulp” will be trimmed down for a TV spot, Seymour wasn’t sure at press time, but he said the agency would love to get the short film shown in movie theaters. “All the fine detail would be blown up on a much bigger scale for everyone to see,” Seymour mused.
