Channel Frederator Blog

Filmmaker Sally Andersen Ward’s “Left Brained Larry & Right Brained Rachel” is a favorite on the internet. Here, the writer/director tells us about the creative process. It’s a rather unique one, since the school she made the film at doesn’t have an animation program.

Channel Frederator: Where did you study animation/film?

Sally Andersen Ward: From September 2008 till May 2009 I attended the European Film College (EFC), an 8½ month foundation course in film making. During my stay I had many great courses, where scriptwriting was definitely my favourite. I ended up having it twice, both as a regular and masterclass.

It was during the masterclass that I finally decided to write “Left-brained Larry & Right-brained Rachel” (L&R), an old idea I had been carrying around, but that I didn’t think would be possible to make with my level of experience. The amazing thing about L&R is that almost none of the people who worked on the film had any animation experience as the EFC does not specialize in animation. When I delivered the script for the year’s Final Projects, I also had to deliver a package describing how exactly the film were to be made in order to convince them that I knew what I was doing. So during about two weeks time until the Final Project deadline I had to gather as much knowledge about stop motion as I could, relying mainly on advice from other students and the things I learnt from a one-day course in 3D animation that the school had arranged.

I was really nervous about my package, but somehow the school was convinced and they chose it to be one of the seventeen Final Projects to accumulate our year. I sighed in relief, but quickly had to toughen up once again, because now we faced a month of very hard work. It was basically “Learning by doing” and amazingly enough we got a crew together of all the right individuals who each contributed with an important element of the production. The learning curve was very steep, and when you look at the film you can definitely see a difference from the first scenes we animated to the later ones. We were all especially thankful to have Peter Witus Nielsen, who was the only one with experience in animation and who had the technological knowledge that made all the things that stop motion could not deliver possible. Without him, the grand climax of the film would probably have looked cheesy and strange. He added effects like smoke and lightning, masked out the wires that made Larry and Rachel fly into the air, made lip sync and corrected all the little mistakes like light change and camera bumps that especially occured in the beginning of the production.

CH: Who are your favorite artists/filmmakers?

SW: Tim Burton is without a doubt my biggest role model and it should be quite clear from the look of L&R. I grew up with his films and they have definitely affected me deeply since I was very little and I guess it therefore seems natural to me to tell these stories of strange outcasts in a simplistic, but visually rich manner. Of course I also adore Henry Selick who has brought us amazing works in stop motion animation. Since I saw Coraline this summer, I’ve watched it several times in order to study the animation closely. It’s really amazing.

In general the artists I look up to are mostly directors with a very distinctive visual style. Some of these are: Wes Anderson, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, The Coen Brothers and Hayao Miyasaki.

CH: What gave you the idea for “Left Brained Larry…”?

SW: I’ve carried the idea for L&R around for quite a few years, but I believe that it came to at around the time when I read Tim Burton’s book “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories” for the first time. I’ve always been very fascinated with the brain and how you can categorize different types of intelligence, and I think somehow in a chain of thought about left- and right-brained theories, influenced by the style of Tim Burton’s book, the characters for Larry and Rachel came to me out of thin air. I think in the case of L&R it’s just one of those ideas that come from something kind of instinctive inside you. You get an image inside your head that you start to analyze, and suddenly it all makes sense.

CH: Why did you choose stop motion over other media?

SW: Well, first of all I think animation of any kind was neccesary in order to bring justice to the story and bring this peculiar couple to life in a proper way. I mean, sure, Larry and Rachel could have been played by real actors, but I think the supernaturality of this animated realm both distances the viewer by the fact that they do not look like you and me, but at the same to brings you closer because the simplicity of the media keeps it less specific and therefore results in a timeless story that basically anyone, somehow can relate to. Does that makes sense?

Also, stop motion, compared to any other type of animation, is, in my view, the one closest to live action film making in that sense that you actually build a physical three dimensional set that you block and light just like a regular set. It’s all a matter of personal taste, but I think I just always had a great fascination for physical art forms such as sculpture, architecture and painting. The fact that it’s all real gives it some kind of realness and organic-ness that other types of animation, at least to me, don’t capture quite as well.

With recent examples, like for instance, “Avatar”, you can argue that CGI today has expanded the limit of reality one can acquire in film to an almost frightening extent. Though, to me, there’s just something about real physical sets that are more pleasing to my eyes. I think it’s a hard question to answer, and in a kind of contrast to what I said about the “realness” of stop motion, at the same time I think the little mistakes and imperfecticalities of stop motion bring it its own unique charm. Most of my favourite films are stop motion animated and I guess that media will always mean something extra special to me. It’s a tedious and very demanding craft, and exactly the craftmanship of it is just something that I respect very much.

CH: Did you run into any obstacles during the filmmaking process?

SW: All the time! Like I mentioned earlier, the production was all “learning by doing”, so naturally we would meet obstacles that we somehow needed to figure out. With a very tight budget we really had to use both brain halves and work together as a team. Crisis meetings were held several times, and as amazing as so many other things that happened during this production - despite all despair - creative solutions always came out of it. We had prepared ourselves to maybe having to loose scenes from the already ambitious six minutes of animation, but in the end no corners were cut and everything that was originally in the script made it into the final film - and much more. I can never be thankful enough to the amazing crew that always added an extra fine dose of humour and detail to the things I had initially envisioned in my mind. On the managing of all this I especially have to mention Niels Wee who produced the film and was the brainworks behind coordinating this complicated production.

CH: What is your favorite part of the film?

SW: A scene that I will never get tired of watching is the one where Rachel is painting and Larry is doing his experiments and the couple end up fighting rather awkwardly. It was mainly animated by Nini Wittendorff who quickly turned out to be a natural talent in animation. She added all these great little humourous details and I think the fight between Larry and Rachel is really well timed.

CH: Do you consider yourself left or right brained?

SW: Believe me, I’ve thought a lot about this! I guess you can say that by heart I am more of a right-brainer in the sense that I daydream a lot and have a very emotionally strong visual way of thinking. By that I mean that I connect a lot of feelings with images and colours and can imagine things very clearly. At the same time, by mind, I’m probably also quite a left-brainer, structured and analytical. I may fantasize a lot, but I bring order to it, especially by writing things down all the time. Actually I think the reason why I love poetry so much is because of the rythmical structure of it.

When it comes down to it, the theories of left- and right-brained thinking is not at all so black and white and in the end a person will always bare qualities from both sides.

CH: Are you working on anything new you can tell us about?

SW: I’m writing on quite a few stories at the moment and sort of shifting between them as I like. One story that has come far is one that I came up with almost at the same time as L&R and meant to be told in a similar style. It goes by the title “Seed Baby” and is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Bloom who give birth to a giant seed. Another story of parental neglect and what it’s like to be an outsider, but with quite a different outcome.

I’ve been very lucky to be able to turn the guestroom in my parent’s house into a workshop where I build stuff for stop motion, experimenting on further developing the experiences we accumilated during L&R, in order to get better functional puppets etc. Since I left EFC I was asked to make an animated commercial for a company and as part of that I had to found my own company for practical reasons. I ended up calling it “Kitty Fish Productions” because I had an idea for an animated logo that would be fun to do. Before soon though, the idea developed and I’ve now come up with a whole series of the “Kitty Fish” character (lots of puns!) and its many adventures.

Right now I’m building sets and puppets for the first episode. Recently I wrote a stop motion project called “City Tales” together with Ina Fischlin, a fellow EFC student. We also wrote and directed a sort of fantasy-like live action short film at EFC and we work really well together. The ideas develop fast because we are of very similar taste, yet bringing each our own influences. We’ll be co-directing City Tales and hope to finish it by the end of next summer.

Thanks a lot for featuring “Left-brained Larry & Right-brained Rachel” here on Channel Frederator! You rule!

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-Bailee DesRocher