INT: How did you eventually make them come to life? Tell us about the process.
WA: We were on set shooting with Mackenzie in a shed that had been built in a studio, where we could control the lighting. The actors would act their scenes to empty jars, and we would take shots of jars, once with clear water, and again with inked up black water, so we could screen reflections easily in post production.
We’d also use a little red cube, in the frame of each shot, so that we could take those cubes away, back to our own studio, and use them to work out where the placement of the camera should be. And then we would shoot the stop motion puppet on a green screen. So we basically matched the camera. Ainslie would do all the stop-motion and I would be compositing and adding the CG elements and lighting effect and inks and, basically, collage them all together to get your final image. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing, but, you know, a real mix of real life and animation.
AH:There was quite a lot of chat about giving each of the homunculi their own character. I definitely wanted them to have their own distinctive movements. I knew I wanted the King to be really pompous, a bit jerky and kind of aggressive. I wanted the other end of the spectrum, the Seraph, to be really elegant and graceful. Then for the Queen to have a kind of uptight regality about her. I definitely had that in mind when I was animating each of them. I had some mad idea halfway through that we might even animate the Seraf backwards. And then reverse it. Thankfully, Will and Mackenzie talked me down from my madness.
WA: There’s always season two.
AH: I do have a bad habit of wanting to make things more difficult than they have to be sometimes. Get lost in the process and excited by possibilities.
WA: I try to make things more easy.
AH: Yeah yeah.