LBB Film Club: Wander to Wonder
Imagine you live a quaint lifestyle with your uncle and act in a children’s show. Until one day he drops dead and you need to figure out the world (and your role in it) all on your own – with your uncle’s corpse lying on the floor as you scavenge for food. Oh, and you’re a 22cm-tall puppet that’s probably never seen the light of day.
That’s basically the gist of Nina Gantz’s latest animated short ‘Wander to Wonder’. A stop-motion tale of three tiny puppets acting in a TV show reminiscent of old British ‘kid’s TV’, puppeteered and voiced by Uncle Gilly, whose sudden (but somewhat expected) death leads to the demise of the puppets’ sanity.
Nina says she wanted to create a story with multiple characters that explored dialogue and complicated storyline, but visually reminded of old combined live action and stop motion such as ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ and ‘Attack of the Puppet People’.
A whopping seven years in the making, ‘Wander to Wonder’ unsurprisingly swept a handful of awards for its undeniably heartfelt, but disturbingly twisted story and the unforgettable craft behind it. After all, creating a tiny character and then dressing it in another tiny character costume to then animate it onto a live-sized set is a feat worth celebrating.
This is precisely why LBB’s Zoe Antonov spoke to Nina, and found out more about the meaning and making of the film.
LBB> Tell me about where the idea for ‘Wander to Wonder’ came from and why was it important for you to create it.
Nina> The idea that it’s all set in an old TV show studio originated between me and Simon Cartwright. We had heard about some of the scandals and abuse linked with some of the most famous British kids TV shows and we became fascinated by the juxtaposition of the sweet innocence of these shows and the murkiness behind the scenes.
A few years into the project, due to budget changes, covid 19, and Simon moving over to another project, I rewrote the script completely with the help of Daan Bakker. That’s when the story became more concentrated on the journey of the little humans and how they all deal with grief in very different ways, but the contrast between the innocent and sinister world is still there.
LBB> What was your character design process like? How did you come up with the three little humans, as well as the three creatures that they play?
Nina> This was actually one of the most complicated things in the preparation of the film because I wanted to create a level of realism to match the stop-motion figures with the Uncle Gilly character without falling into the uncanny valley and making them too freaky. So before going straight into the 3D process, I decided to sculpt them first to keep a certain handmade feeling. I had help from Eve Shepherd, a brilliant artist who makes realistic figures to make them more convincingly human.
All three are blonde and have a pale complexion as I imagined they have never been outside the studio and their similarities help you to think they are all related in some way.
As for the TV show suits, they needed to feel very authentic, so I drew inspiration from old kids British TV show characters such as 'The Flumps' and 'The Wombles'. The actual design of the suits was also informed by the fact that I wanted to see the little human faces through the mouths of the suits and that the costumes had to come off in parts so you could reveal their human bodies bit by bit.
Process shot of making one of the characters
LBB> Tell me about the creator - Uncle Gilly’s character - and his story. How did you cast him and what was important for his character to embody?
Nina> As you can imagine there is a larger backstory for the Uncle Gilly character, but for this film I wanted to keep the attention on the main characters so he just needed to be a kind father figure. He needed to be an older gentleman so that you felt the show had a long history and that the audience could accept that he may have passed away from natural causes.
Neil Salvage, who played Uncle Gilly, was brilliant because he understands the old British TV show references very well. He embodied a Matthew Corbett kind of character who is silly, kind and also an educator.
I was super lucky to find Neil, via Rosie Tonkin, our amazing set designer. As we were transporting the sets from England to Belgium in my dad’s van, I was explaining I still hadn’t found the perfect actor for Gilly and time was pressing. She told me the dad of an old school friend of hers fitted my description perfectly and was a brilliant actor and so it happened, just two weeks before we had to shoot!
LBB> What are the small humans made of - talk to me about your actual creation. How did you achieve that extreme realism?
Nina> The construction of the puppets was informed by the size they needed to be. It was crucial for them to appear small next to the full size props from the set, which meant they would be smaller than the usual puppet size. To provide the right level of expression in their faces, the only way was to use 3D printed replacement animation. This was a totally new technique for me and not widely used yet in animation, so it was quite an undertaking.
I initially sculpted them out of model-making clay. After that, with the help of a fantastic team at Blinkink, they were scanned to create 3D models. Each character had just one expression from the scan, so in order to make the full library of replacement faces I made a sheet with drawings of the key facial expressions and provided films of the actors from the dialogue recording sessions as references for the 3D modellers, Helena Schulin and Sandrine Gimenez.
Process shot of the making of one of the characters
To achieve the feeling that these characters were real little people, the animation had to be very refined. Fortunately, I was lucky to work with some brilliant animators who nailed the performances. They all worked in different ways. Sometimes using reference films or sometimes just by intuition. Although it needed to be realistic I still wanted a stop-motion feel so it was all animated on doubles which helped with not falling into the uncanny valley.
LBB> Tell me more about the sets - both that in which they act when they're filming episodes, and the wider sets of the house. How were these made?
Nina> The sets of the studio were all life-sized, lifted onto animation tables which made them over four metres tall. We divided them into three parts to be able to shoot with two animators at the same time and have one set to prepare the next shot. It was very unusual to work on this scale and sometimes tricky but it also gave us a lot of freedom with our framing and gave us a lot of depth in the images.
Rosie Tonkin, a gem of a person and an amazing artist, helped me design the look of the sets and also made the most amazing props, even hollowing out a real stuffed pigeon to insert an armature. A serious all rounder who you want on your set!
The big sets and props were made by a team in France called Mon Beau Studios and were brought over to the studio in Belgium.
At some point in the filming process, we needed to make things look burnt, which was a frightening thing to do as we actually needed to set some things on fire, so there was no going back.
Our studio was part of a larger post-production studio and so we burned everything outside in the parking lot before bringing it back inside after it had stopped smouldering. The whole place smelled like barbecue for weeks! One night, during this period of burning things, I woke up at three in the morning and thought to myself, what if the wood was still smouldering and it had set the studio on fire, then I would be responsible for burning it to the ground! I could see my name in the newspapers already: “Dutch Animation Director sets Belgian Post House on fire!” I took a taxi back to the studio in the middle of the night to check, but luckily it was all fine!
LBB> What does the jar of pickles symbolise, as well as the moment of its breaking? What were the pickles and the water inside made of?
Nina> Usually pickled and canned food is the last thing you still have in your kitchen cupboard when you are running out of food and so for the little humans in the film, the jar of pickles is actually the only thing that’s left in the studio after they were abandoned. The moment they divide the last gherkin between the three of them, the starvation starts.
I really liked thinking about how these little people get to their food. How do you open a can of beans when you’re 22 cm tall? And how do you break open a huge pickle jar? After a while, I could imagine they would have found special methods as you can see in the film.
We animated the gherkins with a combination of real and epoxy gherkins. The real ones would shrivel too quickly under the light, but for some shots, it was possible to use them. The water is made with replacement pieces of transparent bathroom silicone, Rosie showed us a special way of manipulating it so we could sculpt it by hand in the different stages.
LBB> What role did sound play in this film and when did you most crucially feel its necessity?
Nina> It was important to differentiate between how the characters sounded on the VHS camera and how they sounded outside the ‘show’. Everything you see in the VHS format is mono sound and treated heavily with noise and a minimal reverb which really helped make them sound like we were watching them from within the camera.
The sound also really helped us in the shot of Fumbleton licking the gherkin juice from the inside the jar. This shot took a lot of figuring out as it's actually impossible to animate a character inside a jar! We even tried cutting the jar lengthways, however, it was still too tricky to set it up for the animator. By sheer fluke, I just placed the puppet behind an empty jar to check the reflections in the camera and it totally looked like the puppet was inside! By adding the right kind of reverb on the voice of the puppet, it really helped to make it believable.
LBB> Every character has such an expansive personality and as we watch, we can't help to feel that there is much more to their story than what is shown in the film - how did you manage to build so much of that story in such a short amount of time and fuel curiosity?
Nina> Because we had such a long pre-production (seven years), we went through many versions of the script and spent a lot of time diving into different scenarios with the characters. I think that, along with a solid back story, it helps to create complex and interesting personalities when they appear on screen.
Holding the audience's curiosity is achieved by the way the story is structured and the dialogue is written. In the final version of the script, I decided to tell the story in a less conventional way and to show a series of vignettes rather than the use of a chronological storyline, which gives the impression that a lot of stuff is happening outside of the scene.
The dialogue is also not very expositional, so I leaned on their character traits to hint at the back story. For example, we see Mary, who clings to the past the most, making paper mache figures for the show but the more she deteriorates, the weirder her creations become, almost reflecting her state of mind. The Fumbleton character only speaks in Shakespearean quotes, which is a reaction to him always having to clown around in the kid’s TV show. Now, without the creator around, he finally feels free to show his ambition as a serious actor!
LBB> What did the flies symbolise, if anything but the death of the 'creator', and how were they physically made?
Nina> In the beginning, the flies are there to show how grim the puppets' situation is while they are trying to get on with ‘normal life’, and later on however, the flies also serve as a way to show the passage of time. At the start, they are buzzing around but later you see them all lying dead on the floor.
They were made with epoxy, wire and thin plastic sheets. Rosie made a few different versions from one centimetre to two centimetres, most of them with animatable wings, they looked incredibly realistic. We animated them separately on green screen by doing turnaround shots so we could composite them into any shot. Later we found that the animation of the wings looked too much like butterfly wings, so Christophe Gaultry, our French compositor, found a way to 3D model the wings, so we replaced them.
LBB> Are the characters aware of the outside world or is the little broken part of the door their first meeting with it? What are some signs that tell them there must be something else out there?
Nina> They are aware there is something outside but all they know is what Uncle Gilly has told them. They have either given up on finding a way out at the point we meet them in this film, or they are conditioned to living in the studio and believe there’s nothing for them out there.
The only one who still seems curious about the outside world is Fumbleton who stands in front of the frosted glass of the door waiting for something. When he discovers another form of life, initially, it shocks him, however, when he is confronted with it later on in the film, he instinctively knows what to do with this foreign creature.
LBB> Is there a direct correlation in your eyes between Uncle Gilly and God, or does he stand as a metaphor for any organised system, not solely religion?
Nina> For me he was a ‘father figure’, but you can’t deny he was a certain kind of god for the little humans. I didn’t see it as being religious although I like that people can interpret the film in different ways!
