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NOT SO PERFECT (1:30)

Written and Animated by: Deborah Robinson and Evan DeRushie

Set Design Props: Deborah Robinson
Cinematography: Evan DeRushie
Music: Chris Locke
Pictures: Ben Blanchard
Jason: Jon Perrault
Barbie: Anne Vadas

Thanks to Levi MacDougall, Ryan Ross, Brian Barlow, Millie and Moseby.

FAKE PLASTIC TEARS: Behind the Scenes

To finish off our season, The Wrong Box decided to make something that took longer than a week to put together. I think we chose the right medium, as stop-motion animation is the most painstaking filmmaking process we know of. Everything on screen has to be made in miniature form, and then photographed one movement at a time. Each night we worked on the film, we could only shoot a few seconds at a time. So we locked ourselves up in Deborah's basement and got to work.

Since the world of Barbie is already well known, Deb had a good framework to build around. The cast and a few props were found in toy bins and dollar stores around the city, but most of the props and all the furniture were made from scratch. All the little pieces were built in full detail, no matter how long they were going to be seen on camera. The Barbie dolls we used were all animated exactly how we found them, but a few different dolls were used for the various situations. Our one Barbie could bend at the elbows, so we used her for the hand and arm shots, but she had a wind-up knob on her back, so we had a back-double for reverse shots. Before shooting, everything was arranged then hot-glued to the set, so that nothing would move if (when) we bumped the table during the shot.

Just like the props and sets, we had no budget for expensive lights. Instead I used cheap clamp lights from the hardware store, and built funnels out of cereal boxes onto the front of them to focus and contain the light. The film was shot with a digital SLR camera (a Canon XSi). We used a piece of animation software called Dragon, which allowed us to preview the images from the camera on our computer to see how far we should move the dolls each frame. The final film is composed of just over a thousand pictures.

It was a great experience for Deb and I, and we hope to make more animated films in the next season of The Wrong Box. Not anytime soon though. We spent a week and a half in a basement together. We're not on speaking terms right now.

-Evan