by David Cornelius
The best new movie at this year’s Deep Focus Film Festival wasn’t one of the official selections, but instead a lively cartoon short that played before one of the main features. “Doctor Docatto’s Reprise!!!” is the brainchild of Benjamin W. Neidenthal, Matt Corcoran, and James Davis, three recent graduates from the Columbus College of Art and Design working together as Algorithm Animation. Their project is lively, clever, and, most importantly, very, very funny. If current student films like “Doctor Docatto” and Dony Permedi’s “Kiwi” are any indication, the future of animation is in very good hands indeed.
I recently shot off a few rounds of questions to the trio behind the short film. Here are the highlights.
Explain how the project got started.
Ben: We had all taken a class through the Columbus College of Art and Design called Animation on Location, where we toured a bunch of studios in Los Angeles. We had just toured the Warner Brothers Studio, and came back to the room, and the three of us started talking about making a cartoon. We all are cartoon junkies, and thought it would totally sweet to do one of our own.
“Cartoon” animation seems to be a rare breed in animation schools. How did your school (teachers and/or students) take your decision to do a full-on comedy cartoon, instead of something more art school-y?
Ben: Yeah, the artsy-fartsy stuff is out there. Fortunately, our school doesn’t just cater to that breed. The truth is, our professors are made up of people who have worked in the Hollywood system. Ron Saks is the assistant dean of Media Studies at CCAD, and he has worked on many, many, many animated productions. Our mentor, Charlotte Belland, has experience in the industry as well. We are very fortunate to have teachers who not only totally dig our style, they encourage it. Our fellow students, by and large, have been following the progress of the film since the beginning.
Your website says the script for the film was written in 2000. Why wasn’t it produced then, and what caused Ben to bring it out now, years later?
Ben: I wrote the original story, and made it into a spoken word track in the style of William S. Burroughs. I think a total of, like, five people heard it. Anyway, when we decided to do a cartoon, we tossed a couple ideas back and forth, robots, pirates, stuff like that, and someone mentioned a Mad Scientist, and it reminded me of Dr. Docatto. I pitched it, they liked it, and now it’s a movie. It’s very surreal to me.
Was the 2000 script the same as what became the short film, or was it reworked?
Ben: It worked its way kind of roundabout to almost the same story it originally was. The original story had Doc get to the top of the tower, and drop the cats, and they died. It was a little dark, and both Matt and James shot it down. It was a good call on their part.
While you each have distinct credits on the film, you obviously work as a team. What were your individual chores in making the film? When did you collaborate, and when did you split apart to focus on your own duties?
Matt: I took care most of the technical aspects such as modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, and compositing. Basically I had to create everything you see in the film. Everything from characters, sets, and props had to be built. After a model is made, I then had to paint and add textures to everything. Before being textured, everything is the same flat gray color. Once the animation was done, I would light the scene, which gives each shot its own atmosphere.
Ben: I wrote it; I was the director so I ended up with final say, although many of my kookier ideas were shot down by Matt because of simple logistics, they were just too hard to do. I also animated everything in the entire film, as well as rigged all the characters to make them move. I was most of the voices too…
James: I had the arduous albeit highly enjoyable task of taking all the rendered shots and animated clips and turning them into a movie. Once all of the lighting was set up and the animation was finalized, it was passed to me to be put together. I also was the sound designer, so each and every sound effect you hear, including voices, had to be added in separately by me. In the beginning I was also partly responsible for prop/set modeling and set dressing. I did some voice acting as well.
Who else collaborated on the project?
We had help from two other people: Jessica Entis, who helped pose the background characters for the party scene, and Lucas Sanchez, who modeled “Docatto Castle” and the “Bridge of Ridiculous Proportion.” The Columbus College of Art and Design staff was very encouraging, and supported the project completely. They helped us promote it, too. We are very grateful for that, but at the end of the day, the three of us were responsible for the entire project.
Working with a team often leads to many unused ideas. Any of you regret any individual ideas that were shot down by the group?
Ben: Lots. But it worked out for the best. No hard feelings at all, its just the nature of the game. It will work well if its ever turned into a feature… we will have PLENTY of ideas.
Matt: There were fully lit and rendered shots that were eventually cut from the film altogether.
James: Some had sound and everything.
How do you go about the decision to cut a shot that's had that much work put into it?
Ben: It’s a very hard thing to do to cut shots, especially when you have put a ton of work into them. The ones we cut were out of either necessity to the story, or because the shot got less of a response than we desired - it just wasn’t funny. It’s hard to tell if something is indeed funny while we are making it, when a shot is conceived. We may laugh, but after watching it several hundred times, it loses its pop. So when we show the film to an audience, we listen to their reactions to the film. If a shot gets no response at all, it’s on the chopping block. It’s still hard though - it’s a bit like self-mutilation to cut scenes, but the end result is better. The less lag between jokes, the better.
There are two stunning shots in the film that rely on both an impressive amount of animation detail and a knack for comic timing: the opening scene, when the camera tracks through town and across the bridge to the castle (the aforementioned “Bridge of Ridiculous Proportion”); and later, when we keep going higher and higher and higher, never quite reaching the top of the castle. How did you decide exactly how far to take both visual jokes - when was enough enough, so to speak? And who got stuck with the unfortunate job of bringing such lengthy gags to life?
Ben: First of all, thank you! Second, yeah, the opening shot was the one we worked on the longest.
Matt: Yeah like total, six months…
James: Considering when we started it was just the camera move, then redoing things, along with building the town, and all that.
Matt: The timing finally worked out because we timed it all to the music in the shot.
Ben: We planned it out from the beginning, though, so we knew what was necessary the entire time. That made it easier. The pan up the tower, that was reworked after a prescreening, where it got no laughs at all. James’ brilliance is responsible for fixing that, the beauty of editing.
At seventeen minutes, the film is much longer than your usual student project. Was this a deliberate decision to one-up the competition, a result of the nature of the story, or something else?
Ben: I have no idea… all three maybe?
Matt: Originally it was supposed to be six minutes, and we were strongly advised to whittle it down to, like, three minutes. And somewhere along the lines it tripled…
James: I can’t even imagine it at six minutes now, there would be no coherent story! So I guess it was just necessity.
Considering the longer running time and the elaborate modeling and character work, just how long did this thing take to put together?
James: Pretty much a year and a half of solid work.
Matt: Yeah, a year and a half of forty-hour work weeks on the project alone. Plus full time school, plus full time jobs…
Ben: Plus, Matt got engaged, and married during the time that it was made.
Matt: Yeah! That’s true!
The film got a solid reception at Deep Focus and has been accepted to other fests. What's next for the film?
Ben: We think it would make a great TV show, we have lots of other ideas for stories for this character, and it would make a neat feature too. Right now, though, we just want people to see it and tell us what they thought of it. We are also going to put it on a probe that is going to Mars. Hopefully they like it. If not, it could spark an interstellar war.
And what's next for you three, now that you've all graduated?
Job-hunting. In our spare time, though, we have started another project as Algorithm Animation Studios. It’s very early in production at this time, but it is about pirates who get transported to the modern world, and they attack a US Naval Destroyer.
Finally, the film’s website promises DVDs in the future. What's the word on that?
Yeah, the DVD is kind of “on hold” at present, because we are focusing on getting the film to festivals and shows. The DVD will be totally sweet, though. We are going to have a bonus disc with lots of cool goodies on it, “making-of” featurettes, a look at the tech behind the film, a couple deleted shots, and some good old-fashioned nonsense too.
For news on where to catch “Doctor Docatto’s Reprise!!!” next, visit www.DoctorDocatto.com.
link directly to this feature at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2171
originally posted: 04/24/07 12:59:40
last updated: 04/24/07 13:02:41
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