Even though Marcel is one-inch tall, how do we photograph him so he feels like a five-foot-tall person would in the frame?įilmmaker: Bianca, did you have some sort of Marcel stand-in on set for framing and lighting reference?Ĭline: We had the actual Marcel. That was always kind of a theme on the movie. So, trying to make them work for this and make it feel like we’re filming was difficult. GoPros are really meant for wide-angle action photography, to be far away from people. We had to use three of the suction cup to hold the camera. When those cameras are that close to something you also see a lot of jiggle. Those cameras are not designed for being up close, so we had to get macro adapters, like tiny diopters, that we could put on the GoPros. We did a bunch of tests to figure it out.
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We just drove around, then picked out the best portions for shadows and sunlight and such and Eric had to match to that.Īdkins: We looked at Bianca’s shots and analyzed each frame to be able to say, “Oh, the car is going into a daylight fill here for a long period, then here’s a dapple of light, then all of a sudden we are in the broad sunlight with an arcing bend.”Ĭline: The trickiest thing from my end for that scene was how to photograph something as small as Marcel that close with a GoPro. We did have some sets that were full, like a windowsill or the glass tabletop for the skating sequence.įilmmaker: The level of detail and interactivity between Marcel and his surroundings was amazing to me, even down to the shadows, which would be soft if he was in a soft source or hard if he was in a harder source, like the scene where he’s riding on the car dashboard.Ĭline: That car shot was a pretty tricky one, especially filming it with a GoPro. So, we can just alternate exposures and create a backlight that has pure silhouette. We can make a high key alpha matte, because there’s no moving parts to it. We were keying a lot on white and gray surfaces, because in stop motion we can actually not shoot greenscreen if we want. We did have 15 stages, but they contained partial sets.
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Granted, you’re compositing into live action shots as opposed to having to create full sets for everything, but that’s still a significant disparity.Īdkins: We had a very organized shoot. I did an interview with the DP of Isle of Dogs, and that was an 87-week shoot. įilmmaker: That’s much shorter than I would’ve guessed. Four and a half months later, we resumed and did another 10 weeks. We got two weeks into shooting and the COVID lockdown happened. I would say I started preproduction three months after that. Then, when we shot the live action, I was there on set with the visual effects supervisor and animation director. With Marcel in theaters, Cline and Adkins spoke to Filmmaker about blending live action and stop motion together to create the movie’s faux-documentary aesthetic.įilmmaker: Eric, what was the timeline of your work on the film? How long after the live action component wrapped did you get to work on the animated portion?Īdkins: I had actually shot some technical tests of live action and stop motion about a year prior just to try to sell the package.
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Months later, armed with copious notes to match lighting, lensing, focus, etc., stop motion director of photography Eric Adkins brought Marcel to life frame by frame, so that the diminutive shell could be composited into Cline’s original photography. First, cinematographer Bianca Cline captured the live-action components, leaving a Marcel-sized space in the compositions. Marcel, the story of a chatty one-inch tall seashell searching for his family, was in essence shot twice. To create the new A24 release Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, that maxim had to expand to accommodate an additional creative cycle.
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There’s a saying that a movie is made three times: once when it’s written, once when it’s shot and once when it’s edited. Bianca Cline, Eric Adkins, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On