DRAMA | CATS
was great to be part of an amazing team with the production designer Eve Stewart, Tom’s editor Melanie Oliver and sound recordist Simon Hayes. It was a phenomenal creative team behind the project. “What’s great about the scaling is it’s kind of like a double-edged sword. It offers up some huge logistical challenges, but from a framing perspective, it offers up loads of fun to be had. For instance, we’re currently grading the Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer song and that exists in an oversized garden that leads in to an oversized bedroom, to an oversized staircase, to an oversized dining room. They ransack the house, kind of thing. Eve built the huge armchairs, the double bed, the enormous gramophone – every item in the room was created as a real element and the choreography team, led by Andy Blankenbuehler, did a great job of bringing the dance routine into the
the musical. The one thing – if you listen to the songs from the show and the movie – is that it’s a musical journey that Andrew Lloyd Webber is taking himself on. He is exercising his different genres. There’s a charleston-style song, a big sweeping ballad, a jazz tap number – it’s quite eclectic, so I wanted to bring a sense of what that mix of musical influences brings to the table.” Ross brought some images from influences like Busby Berkeley, An American in Paris , West Side Story , Cabaret , Sweet Charity , Grease , La La Land , The Greatest Showman and the music videos for Lemonade and This Is America . A hugely wide-ranging list of dance and musical material. “I wanted to create a list of what’s
common and what’s iconic, and how do those two worlds collide?” THE SCALE The initial concept for the movie was to bring the world down to the size of cats, which meant creating an oversized world. Ross explains the process. “We had to then calculate the size of things like double beds, dining room tables, that kind of thing. If you’re going to make a film based on scaling something, then the best reference for that is Toy Story . I also brought a bunch of images from Toy Story and it was like, ‘This is how you make a world inhabited by little creatures’. We had a great meeting and Tom invited me to join him on the adventure. It
If you’re going to make a film based on scaling something, the best reference is Toy Story
IMAGES Mungojerrie, Rumpleteazer and Victoria ransack an oversized bedroom
18 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 2020
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