DEFINITION April 2018

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ISLE OF DOGS SHOOT STORY

stop-motion feature films: Chicken Run , The Curse of the Were-Rabbit , Fantastic Mr. Fox , and ParaNorman . 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. Fox , The Grand Budapest Hotel , The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom. Pre- production on Isle of Dogs began in October 2015, with camera tests about six months before principal photography. “Everything is built,” Oliver says. “It’s not a case of going to John Lewis and buying your crockery. 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.” 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. 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. “We can’t animate to scratch because the timing is wrong,” says Oliver, emphasising the importance of planning. “You go into a stop- motion project knowing every frame you are going to shoot. It is utterly pointless shooting coverage or making it up on the fly.”

irector of Photography Tristan Oliver had, he says, “a fairly unconventional route into the industry. I was very much a performer in my early adult life. I wanted to be an actor and all that stuff. 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. 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. If you are a good focus puller, people won’t let you do anything else as you’re too valuable!” 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. “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. They said ‘what are you doing next week?’”

“There was the kid in the corner of the room who was finishing off his graduation film,” Oliver recalls. “That was Nick [Park], who was making Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out . 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. All it was at that point was children’s TV stuff: flat, toplit, soft, no shadows, knock it out as fast as you can. He was frustrated with that... the camera department was trying not to make any concessions to the medium of animation.” Since the 1980s and Aardman, Oliver had up to now directed photography on four YOU ARE GOING TO SHOOT. IT’S UTTERLY POINTLESS SHOOTING COVERAGE OR MAKING IT UP YOU GO INTO A STOP-MOTION PROJECT KNOWING EVERY FRAME

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APRIL 2018 DEFINITION

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