“I like to think of this exercise as the biggest short film ever made,” he says. Mission accomplished, with the film finally finished. We just wanted to create something that was all things for all people.” The Chaperone took an Honourable Mention in the short-film category at the Toronto International Film Festival even though it was far from finished. Then again, we’ve also won in the animation and documentary categories, too. We even won a fiction award at one festival, even though it is really an animated documentary. “It checked off as a documentary and non-fiction and animation. “The nice thing about film festivals is that The Chaperone fit every single conceivable category,” Munden cracks. But it was still far from finished, not that it stopped Munden and his team from entering a host of other film festivals. Sure enough, The Chaperone took an Honourable Mention in TIFF’s short-film category. So then we were able to raise the Titanic by using our acceptance to TIFF to raise more money to try to finish the film.” He had interpreted all our mistakes as an artistically intentional thing. The TIFF guy thought it was actually really creative in leaving all those looseleaf papers and drawings in. I felt so dejected, but then I got a call from TIFF, congratulating me and saying we were in. I didn’t think we were even going to get in. “Everything was sort of a disaster, sending storyboard drawings. Munden, with co-writer and co-animator Neil Rathbone and producer Mike Glasz, submitted only 20 per cent of The Chaperone to the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Everything was like re-inventing the wheel for us.” And, honestly, though we are credited as animators, we had no real animation training at school. “But in terms of the volume of work involved, it was so much more than anything we had done before. “It took us so long to get our bearings together, so we decided to get a feel from the festivals if we were on the right track,” says Munden, who graduated with a degree in communications from Concordia. In fact, even before The Chaperone was completely finished, it was entered into a slew of film fests and, among other honours and cash awards, it picked up the Gold Audience Award and Most Creative Short Award at Fantasia and the Coupe du Court Grand Prize for best short in Quebec at Prends ça court.Īrticle content The Chaperone director Fraser Munden and teacher-hero Ralph Whims. Some of the funding for The Chaperone came from Vaseline and Pepper winning $2,500 in technical services for having taken The Norman McLaren Award for best short at the 2010 Montreal World Film Festival. Why I Was Out There deals with an alleged UFO sighting in the Point, while the equally whimsical Vaseline and Pepper focuses on the tale of a 12-year-old who made himself a bogus beard of Vaseline and pepper flakes in order to get into a strip club. The Chaperone is actually the third short in a trilogy based on stories Munden heard while growing up. The narrative is compelling enough in The Chaperone, but I wanted to sensationalize it enough that it could play anywhere and fit into any category.” “To speak truthfully, I try to ram as many gimmicks as humanly possible into my films. “I like to think of my work as an unconventional approach to documentary shorts,” Munden, 29, understates. To keep costs down, the film was made in Munden’s Point St-Charles basement, living room and driveway as well as at a nearby football field. He used over 10,000 hand drawings, many of which he coloured himself.Īnd, oh yeah, Munden claims The Chaperone is the first animated documentary made entirely in stereoscopic 3D. Munden has recreated the story by melding hand-drawn animation, miniature sets, puppets, live action Kung Fu and special-effects explosions. He calls The Chaperone an animated documentary, which sounds simple enough. With such rich and riveting source material, Munden could have easily re-enacted this drama in a live-action film that would have taken just a few weeks to shoot and edit. Whims did get a wee bit of help from the dance DJ, Stefan Czernatowicz, but his martial-arts prowess became the stuff of legend in the Point. Though his students thought he was cool enough a teacher, no one had a clue that Whims was really Point St-Charles’s answer to Bruce Lee, deftly using his arms and legs to effectively neutralize and even hospitalize a few of the dozen desperadoes who disrupted the dance.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |