The 2012 Cannes Film Festival is here. The high mass of cinema, which celebrates its 65th edition this year, opens Wednesday night with Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, the story of two 12-year-olds who fall in love in 1965 New England.

The U.S. presence seems particularly strong at Cannes this year, with American titles dotting the main competition (Paperboy, Mud, etc.) and the official poster featuring a fetching Otto Bettman shot of Marilyn Munroe blowing out of a single birthday cake candle.

Canadian talent is also well represented on the famous palm-lined Croisette. The Cronenbergs are there (Senior with Cosmopolis and Junior with Antiviral) as is Montreal’s own Xavier Dolan, whose Laurence Anyways will be screened as part of the Un Certain Regard series. (The film marks the 23-year-old’s third Cannes appearance after J’ai tué ma mère and Les Amours Imaginaires.)

Not to be left out, the NFB has 2 films in competition at the Short Film Corner. The two animated films are Patrick Bouchard’s Bydlo, a tragic vision of mankind heading for disaster inspired by the 4th movement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Kaspar, a Diane Obomsawin short about a young man who discovers life – and light – after spending his entire existence in a dark cave. (The film is based on the story of Kaspar Hauser, the famous 19th century orphan who inspired countless artists.) See snippets from both films below.

The NFB has a long and fruitful history with the French festival. Review some of the highlights of those 6 and a half decades of mutual appreciation with a few of our Palme d’Or- winning titles:

The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1953)

A light-hearted animated short about how Canada’s vast distances and great obstacles were overcome by settlers. By Colin Low.

Blinkity Blank, by Norman McLaren (1955)

A playful exercise in intermittent animation and spasmodic imagery. By Norman McLaren.

Balablok, by Bretislav Pojar (1973)

An exploration of the human penchant for resorting to violence instead of reason. By Bretislav Pojar.

When the Day Breaks (1999)

A tale about feeling alone in a city filled with people featuring Ruby, a the pig who seeks affirmation after witnessing the accidental death of a stranger. By Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby.

This is a guest post by Jesse Gouchey, one of 6 animators participating in this year’s Hothouse program, the NFB’s 12-week paid apprenticeship for emerging filmmakers.

Where is it saved?

ZED!

Fine-tuning dopesheets using Geppetto to polypose Sheeps Dreams over the weekend anyone?

Yes please!

SANDDE is the software I’m attempting to conquer. With endless animating capabilities and user-friendly controls, I’m very impressed by it’s awesomeness.

To draw, I stand up waving my hand holding a controller similar that of a Nintendo Wii in front of a 60″ television – painting digitally. The idea is to replicate painting with a spray can but indoors, and stereoscopically, which is also a healthier alternative.

It’s definitely fun and easy to use, but lacks accuracy and control. I really enjoy working with this animation tool and hope to use it again at some point.

Action sequences are tightening and soundtracks revised but there’s still lots of empty spaces to fill. For us Hothousers, time is nearing completion so we’re working steady. Some hectic deadlines and chaotic days have made for a memorable experience already. Such a fun time working at the NFB.

Word up!

This is a guest post by Rosa Aiello, one of 6 animators participating in this year’s Hothouse program, the NFB’s 12-week paid apprenticeship for emerging filmmakers.

Notes for a blog post (surrender to materials):

• Objects have a life of their own
• Flight, the feeling that something is behind you, a person or a place, perpetual turning back
• Elephant man, exile, an inanimate man breaks down
• Secret in a container, something valuable or something forbidden
• One answer to a mystery, if more than one answer or no answers, then not a mystery, just speculating
• The movement of sand, the formation of mountains, a moral geology, ethics of fluidVortex, vertiginous hole, snake hole
• A history that repeats

May 13th marks the 76^th anniversary of the birth of experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. I thought it appropriate to talk about his films and why they have become such cult classics. I could easily write a 200-page book on his oeuvre, so instead of attempting to cover everything I am going to limit myself to A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965), my favourite Lipsett film.

Mention Lipsett’s name and most people will immediately think of his first major film, Very Nice, Very Nice, released in 1961. The Oscar nomination it received propelled it into the mainstream and helped put Lipsett on the map. His manipulation of images and sound transformed the ordinary into the unusual. Using snippets of film and audio, he gave an original interpretation of the malaise of the time.

While I think Very Nice, Very Nice is a terrific film, A Trip Down Memory Lane—his “additional material for a time-capsule,” as an intertitle puts it—is, in my opinion, his best. The first time I saw it, I felt like he had totally transfigured the newsreel, distilling it to its bare elements and re-working them in some twisted way.

In his film proposal Lipsett wrote that he wanted to make “an experimental treatment of newsreel material treated as an expressive journalistic capsule.” He worked with legendary documentary filmmaker Donald Brittain on this film, who acted as Lipsett’s producer.

In an interview, Brittain basically said that he ran interference for Lipsett, explaining to NFB programming committee members what Lipsett was trying to achieve, something Lipsett was not able to do. Lipsett ordered a great deal of newsreel footage from various American companies and began to manipulate it over several months. He spent more than $8,500 on footage alone (those are 1964 dollars!).

Years ago I saw the film Gizmo, a compilation of newsreel clips from the 1930s and 1940s that focuses on crazy and unusual inventions. These hundreds of clips are presented one after another and feature such interesting contraptions as a bathing cap for your beard and an alarm clock that whips off your blankets in an effort to wake you up. This film is a great deal of fun to watch, but the night I saw it, I dreamt about it, and my mind totally mashed it all up into a crazy mix of the weird and the twisted.

Watching A Trip Down Memory Lane reminds me of that dream.

I won’t dissect the entire film, but here are a few sequences that I find fascinating. The opening footage of a beauty pageant from 1959 would seem quite ordinary if not for the terrifying drums Lipsett has put on the soundtrack, replacing whatever commentary originally existed. It gives the images of the women in competition an eerie and unsettling quality. A beauty pageant is a very mundane affair, but Lipsett has turned it into a voyeuristic, uncomfortable spectacle.

The very next sequence is a clip showing a procession of elephants in India. Lipsett has not manipulated the soundtrack, but by choosing this clip, which starts in the middle of the action, he has made this supposedly glorious procession look simply ridiculous. The music on the original newsreel is overly dramatic and the narration pompous (“…for those who like brave men, bravely dressed…”), which adds to the effect.

Other unsettling sequences include that of the little girl strapped to the top of a high-flying hot air balloon. No need to manipulate anything here; this is simply creepy, and in direct contrast with some of the film’s humorous moments, like when the “daredevil” launches his flying machine off a cliff. Lipsett adds a piece of heroic music to underline the silliness of the whole exercise. This is followed by a title card that reads, “It was a nice job while it lasted.” All that’s missing is Nelson from The Simpsons with a well-timed “Ha Ha!”

Lipsett then returns to a series of serious moments (some downright disturbing), such as shots of people falling to their death from a zeppelin intercut with footage of a religious ceremony and a soundtrack of Gregorian chants. The chants continue as we are presented with spectacular footage of navy ships on exercises. Lipsett’s message here is clear: We are worshipping the wrong things. To drive home the point, this sequence continues with a very sick old man lying in a hospital bed wearing his war medals.

Lipsett is especially keen on showing us interesting faces. Witness the sequence in which a tall man stiffly dances with a woman. The looks on their faces are priceless. Since this film was made during the atomic age, it is no surprise to also see a victim of the atomic bomb and footage of radioactive material being handled. This is followed by footage of the principal people involved in the Manhattan Project. Lipsett is content to just show them listening and waiting. There is no way he is going to let them speak after the havoc they have wreaked on the world.

The ending is typical Lipsett. He shows us a sword swallower in slow motion, accompanied by a distorted soundtrack (it is actually composed of carnival noises and music, slowed down and altered to the point of being unintelligible). The reason I find this important is that Lipsett has once again turned the mundane into something odd and surprisingly bone-chilling.

Like all his previous films, A Trip Down Memory Lane was a huge hit, most notably winning awards at the Venice and San Francisco film festivals.

Some readers who have made it this far will no doubt feel that the film I have described is disjointed and rambling. It is, to be sure—but that is what makes it special. There is a clear message throughout: that the 20th century was a crazy, mixed-up time and that, too often, the things we found fascinating were simply ridiculous or grotesque.

Lipsett is presenting his vision of this era, and the beauty is that it can be interpreted in many different ways. What is most important is your instinctive reaction while viewing the film. For me, it resembles a crazy dream, complete with terrifying moments and very silly ones. For you, it could be something totally different. I invite you to watch it and let your senses be wowed.

Enjoy the film.

For those of you who want to know more about the works of Arthur Lipsett, we recommend the documentaries The Arthur Lipsett Project: A Dot on the Histomap and Remembering Arthur, both available on NFB.ca.

This is a guest post by David Barlow-Krelina, one of 6 animators participating in this year’s Hothouse program, the NFB’s 12-week paid apprenticeship for emerging filmmakers.

It’s been an intense few weeks here at Hothouse. We just reached picture lock this weekend, and in the few weeks prior to this deadline, all of us have been scrambling to create as much material as possible for our editor and sound designer.

The idea of picture lock means that all time-related events in the picture must be locked “to the frame”. My film combines 2D hand-drawn animation with 3D particle effects, so I had to time out all of my character’s actions (footsteps, impacts, voice, etc.) as well as determine the movement of the particles. I really wanted the particles to create a certain kind of sound, so in addition to the determining the particle’s sync points, I also had to figure out its “quality” of motion.

The particles can move in any number of ways, but each would invoke it’s own particular sound texture. Between now and the time that the sounds are added, my challenge has been to tweak the particle’s visual aesthetic to match my intended sound aesthetic (which at this point, is still in my head).

Controlling the movement of the particles has been difficult. It’s one thing to visualize how you want them to move, but actually doing it is much harder, especially when you’re restricted to dialing in numerical values in the 3D software.

I’ve been able to create interesting motion using a combination of techniques: force fields (wind, vortexes, turbulence), emitters (point emitters, volume emitters), friction (the rate at which the particles lose their momentum), motion paths and editing techniques (time-stretching, time-remapping).

It seems like the more I try to force the particles to go where I want them to go, the less natural the particles appear. It’s all about finding a balance between having control, and surrendering control to the software. I did a few tests where I tried pushing the particles along a motion path, but the resulting animation looked too stiff; all of the particles moved at the same rate and on the exact same trajectory.

This technique might have worked if I wanted to create a flowing river on a stationary surface, but not for something like a swarm of bees moving through the air. For natural movement, I achieved the best results using a more minimal approach. I was able to push the particles in one way or another using a single turbulence field and experimenting with different values for the phase and frequency. It’s a lot of trial and error… not to mention the fact that 3D particles seem to enjoy making my computer crash!

This is a guest blog post written by NFB animation producer, Marcy Page. Marcy, along with Spike Jonze and Vince Landay, produced Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must be More to Life, based off beloved author Maurice Sendak’s book of the same name.

Although Sendak is most famous for his ode to childhood imagination, Where the Wild Things Are, when asked by Stephen Colbert which of his own books was his favourite, he responded with a little known gem called Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must be More to Life.

A couple of years ago, the NFB and Warner Home Video were given the distinct privilege of adapting Sendak’s personal favorite story into a short film.

When we made the short, we understood that the story was very near and dear to Sendak, seeing as how he wrote it at a time when he lost both his mother and his favourite pet. In many ways, Higglety Pigglety Pop! was a way for Sendak to help process the experience of death in a cathartic manner, and the film’s directors, Chris and Maciek, took the utmost care and respect to make sure the film would honor Sendak’s work.

If you’d like to see the entire film, we’re offering it as a download for only $.99 for the next 2 days.

In the mean time, watch the trailer,

and see some behind-the-scenes sneak peeks:

Let the wild rumpus live on!

This is a guest post by Susan Wolf, one of 6 animators participating in this year’s Hothouse program, the NFB’s 12-week paid apprenticeship for emerging filmmakers.

Today, I started animating the hero of my film, a small fluffy cloud.

See, the plan is that each of my characters and elements will be shot against a blue screen with a still camera and composited together using the computer program After Effects. The past month was a crash course in After Effect as I cobbled together an animatic (like a rough computer-made version of my film). I feel pretty good about my progress with After Effects. I’m at least able to do basic tasks like move stuff around and create simple effects. Most importantly, I’m no longer intimidated and see myself using it for animation in the future.

This week, however, is all about my hands and eyes. I’ve moved into under the camera mode and I’m having transition pains. Today, like yesterday, I kept expecting the animation I do with my fingers and muscle memory to look as even and perfect as the computer stand-ins I used to map out my timing. Of course, I don’t really want the stop motion to look computerized. I love the feel of the human hand in claymation and puppet animation. And my background is hands-on… I was trained as a sculptor and silversmith. Still, it’s a fine line between handmade and sloppy. I always struggle with knowing where that line is, and how anal retentive to get.

So, today I moved the cloud, moved the cloud, moved the cloud. I finally got my groove going at around 10pm… after an afternoon of failed attempts. Stop-motion animation requires a special kind of concentration and being in the zone. Look at the puppet, move the puppet, look at the screen, look at the previous shot, look at the shot with and without the background line-up layer, decide whether the shot is good enough to keep, repeat. Review progress every 10 shots. Start again every few hours when object looks too choppy or wiggly.

For better or worse everything about animation taps into my obsessive tendencies.  I’ve been making the tiny hands I’ll be using later in my animation during my breaks. I keep them in a tupperware next to a growing array of chocolate wrappers and the dirty coffee mugs that I’ve been hoarding from the communal kitchen. The hands look like a creepy taxonomy and smell like new plastic. I’m looking forward to using them. So much more fun to animate adorable malleable fingers than the rigid yellow button sun or the erratic woolly oblong clouds. It’s the control I relish. Mwaaahaaahaa.

Denis Villeneuve’s first film, REW-FFWD (1994) opens on a shot of buzzards scampering off and a close-up of a dead dog being snacked upon by maggots. A voice, which you guess belongs to a magazine editor, is inquiring in a less-than-pleased tone of voice why on earth a dead dog ended up on the front cover.

The film, as we soon learn, has very little to do with dead dogs, or maggots, or magazines. It’s about Jamaica, as seen through the baffled eyes of a Montreal photographer who gets stranded in a rough part of the Jamaican capital (Trench Town) when his car refuses to start up one morning (someone stole a part of the motor.)

Our man, we are told, was on assignment to photograph Miss World 1976 (incidentally, reggae performer Damian Marley‘s mother), but thanks to his vehicular woes, ends up spending quality time with ganja-happy Rastafarians and other Trench Town luminaries instead – a prospect he warms up to only very very, gradually.

Villeneuve’s Jamaican footage could – theoretically – have been edited as straight documentary, fiction, or even a mix of the 2 (docufiction). Yet, the young filmmaker chose to term his film a “psychodrama.”

The “psycho-” component of that appellation is carried by a little black box that is said to contain the photographer’s “every memory, every experience, every breath”.

Our guy, it appears, has been “traumatized by a special experience” in Jamaica, and he is going to have to revisit that trauma to overcome it. (Pop Psychology 101.)

On the front of the black box are 4 buttons (play, pause, rewind, fast-forward) and it is those 4 commands that shape the film, from the dead dog to the end credits. (And yes, the title, too.)

We are introduced to this narrative device (the black box) by a disembodied voice that introduces itself as the photographer’s “psychiatrist-mechanic”.

When the would-be paparazzo says he doesn’t understand what is going on (who could blame him), the voice says: “You’re the protagonist of a broken-down road movie, therefore you need a psychiatrist-mechanic.” Fair enough. (My exact thoughts were: if you say so.)

So let’s press play.

Black box or no black box, Villeneuve’s images of Kingston are worth your while. There’s footage here of Coronation Market, the capitals’ sprawling open-air market, and of other parts of town, captured from the window of a moving car (filmmaking’s own drive-by shooting).

But the heart of the matter is Trench Town (anciently home to reggae legends Peter Tosh, Bob Marley and countless others), a historically volatile neighbourhood whose greatest challenge, then as today, remains poverty.

There, we meet Mike (Michael Smith), who takes our photographer under his wing and into Trench Town’s complex maze of interior courtyards and shanties.

For a second, you fear for the stranded Montrealer, white-skinned, car-less and sporting a serious Québécois accent, as he enters what he describes as “the eye of the storm”, a dot in the middle of such chaos and violence it can seem eerily quiet. You keep wondering about this terrible trauma, wondering about the dog. But seeing the crew of characters he meets there, you just know every little thing, is gonna be allright.

There’s singing, there’s talking, there’s lots of smoking. There’s a “car engineer” who says he taught himself engineering by extrapolating from partially damaged car repair manuals. There’s an entire busload of children crowding a beached VW bus singing “Soca-Rumba” at the top of their lungs. There’s discussion of Jamaica’s Africa-inherited “yard system”, and its rapid erosion. There’s talk of repatriation to Africa.

Nothing dramatic or spectacular happens (something you find yourself being somewhat grateful for), but being afforded a glance into 1994 Trench Town feels, in itself, refreshing and spectacular enough.

Check it out.

This is a guest post by Wen Zhang, one of 6 animators participating in this year’s Hothouse program, the NFB’s 12-week paid apprenticeship for emerging filmmakers.

On paper, my job is “filmmaker”, but now, two-thirds of the way through Hothouse 8, I like to think that we are entering a new territory and redefining what that word encompasses. The project (working title: “dream.exe”) is an experiment to combine Kinect motion capture, music, and generative visuals into something compelling, and the fun comes from wearing a variety of hats to put it together.

One of the odd things that you’ll notice if you pass by my desk often (and a lot of people do) is that I’m almost always staring at C++ code. Conceived as distinct film (linear) and interactive experiences, I am building my own software from the ground up to fulfill this vision, and existing 3D programs like Maya or game engines aren’t going to cut it.

First of all, the interactive version needs to run real-time, so Maya is out. Secondly, I have my own strange ideas for non-photorealistic representations of 3D “people clouds”, and game engines aren’t really designed for that sort of thing. A constant challenge is balancing visual sophistication with the performance requirements. It’s like translating images in my mind’s eye into code, and it’s ironic that I have to think in cold logic to portray the organic and lively subconsciousness of a (fictional) computer.

On the other (and equally important) half the equation, I am working with the composer/sound designer Luigi Allemano, classical composer Ana Sokolovic, and UQAM intern Louis Gingras to create a layered musical soundscape that forms the living heartbeat of the piece. What’s interesting is that, in the interactive version, the musical elements are shaped by the viewer’s movements, which also play into the way the visuals look and feel.

At the end of the day, we have a bunch of elements–motion capture data, music, algorithms, and even some live action footage–that all need to get mixed together to make coherent whole. It’s often easy to lose sight of the overall vision, and sometimes it’s hard to know what will work unless we try it and see if it sets like good mayonnaise (as our dear producer Jelena often tells me). Whatever it is, it’s going to be awesome.

This is a guest post by Carrie Monbourquette, one of 6 animators participating in this year’s Hothouse program, the NFB’s 12-week paid apprenticeship for emerging filmmakers.

Making a film is kind of like raising a kid. It demands all of your time, you stop going out, and you have to change it a lot.

Soon all your talking about is your film. You forget that other things are happening in the world. You keep an updated reel on your smartphone so you can show your half-interested roommates (or that nice old lady at the metro stop) the latest cut or fade or expression you’ve been working on.

It’s frustrating, it’s rewarding, it’s life affirming. It keeps you up till 3 am.

And I love every single second of it. Being able to take 2 dozen bricks of children’s plasticine and turn it into a cast of living, breathing polar bears is why I get out of bed in the morning.

The biggest adjustment I’ve had to make at the NFB is the incredibly intimate relationship that everyone else in the department seems to have with my film. Or should I say, our film. Our little film that we have to preen and scold and correct and make sure that when we send it out the door it has it’s lunch packed and hair combed and face wiped so that the other films will like it and play with it. And when we’ve sent it off with all of our love and grand expectations all we can really do is hope that we brought it up right and it will be able to stand on it’s own 2 big awkward polar bear feet.

And once it’s finally out there in the big world, this incredibly proud parent will finally be able to catch up on all the Game of Thrones she’s missed.

Dream life.