![]() Isle of Dogs was shot on digital stills cameras, in common with many other recent stop-motion productions, although Oliver emphasises that the recently-developed Canon 1Dx DSLR is much better for stop-motion work than pre-existing options. “You could be doing a single close-up on a character frowning and it might take forever because it has to look absolutely right to whatever emotion is going through the character’s head.” If it’s acting, it’s one guy in a room for as long as it takes.” The time required, he says, is hugely variable. If you have a crowd scene, you might have an assistant animator tweaking the background. There’s a high concentration level required and having anyone else in that space can actually be distracting. The nuances of performance might vary between them. ![]() “The animator is very much stepping out on the stage to give a performance. Oliver refers frequently to animators using terminology more often associated with actors. “The 1dx cameras were each tethered to workstations running dragonframe” - Tristan Oliver It is utterly pointless shooting coverage or making it up on the fly.” “You go into a stop-motion project knowing every frame you are going to shoot. “We can’t animate to scratch because the timing is wrong,” says Oliver, emphasising the importance of planning. This group spent only a few days recording the production dialogue, which was then edited into essentially a radio play to which the animators would work. The film’s voice cast is an impressive ensemble including Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson and many others. ” 600 C-stands were part of the gear purchase order”. ![]() There’s a lot of issues in paint, textures, will the materials they’re using for the faces take light properly… I’m usually involved pretty early.” “It’s not a case of going to John Lewis and buying your crockery. Pre-production on Isle of Dogs began in October 2015, with camera tests about six months before principal photography. Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom. His fifth is Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, produced by Anderson’s American Empirical Pictures and Indian Paintbrush, which had also been involved in the Anderson-directed Fantastic Mr. Since the 1980s and Aardman, Oliver had up to now directed photography on four stop-motion feature films: Chicken Run, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Fantastic Mr. He was frustrated with that… the camera department was trying not to make any concessions to the medium of animation.” All it was at that point was children’s TV stuff: flat, toplit, soft, no shadows, knock it out as fast as you can. But they were mainly shooting commercials.” Oliver is keen to cite the influence of Aardman co-founder David Sproxton, who was “driving towards a cinematic approach to shooting stop-motion. “That was Nick, who was making Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out. “There was the kid in the corner of the room who was finishing off his graduation film,” Oliver recalls. ![]() “The Canon 1Dx DSLR is by far the best camera for stop motion”. They said ‘what are you doing next week?’” “One sort of fateful day I rang Aardman,” he says, “who at that time were three blokes in a garage, because I knew someone there and I needed some lights for a pop promo. In 1988, Oliver made first contact with Aardman Animations, who would later produce the Wallace and Gromit TV and feature series as well as Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Early Man and many other stop-motion greats. If you are a good focus puller, people won’t let you do anything else as you’re too valuable!” We gelled as a group and one of the movies I shot as a graduation piece did very well on the student film circuit.” Initially, Oliver was keen to move up in the conventional way, but “very quickly proved myself to be a wholly inadequate focus puller – which was a good thing, I think. I had a small amount of success doing that, but it was whilst I was shooting a movie called Another Country that I became very, very interested in what the camera crew were doing.” Pursuing camera at film school, Oliver found himself amongst “a lucky group of people. I wanted to be an actor and all that stuff. I was very much a performer in my early adult life. We talked with Isle Of Dogs DOP Tristan Oliver about surviving the experienceĭirector of Photography Tristan Oliver had, he says, “a fairly unconventional route into the industry. There is a good reason stop-motion movies aren’t the norm.
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