Interview with stop motion filmmakers Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels
Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels are a stop motion animator duo based in Ghent, Belgium. His brilliant short film Oh Willy… (selected at Animac 2013) traveled the festival circuit around the world, and its animation on wool inspired a new wave of stop motion filmmakers and animators. In celebration of the theme of Animac 2019, we interviewed Emma and Marc during the Annecy 2018 festival to talk about their work and their latest 44-minute medium-length film, This Magnificent Cake!
Animac Magazine: Thank you very much for your time! Our first question may seem obvious, but it is something we want to ask all the stop motion artists we interviewed: why stop motion? What is your personal connection with stop motion as a technique?
Emma De Swaef: For me, it’s all about the puppets. I already made puppets before doing animation – I was studying film while building puppets. Puppets are a really exciting thing – just building them and then imagining them coming to life… that’s the beauty of it. And stop motion, of course, not only allows you to imagine that they are alive, but that they actually come to life for the people who see them as well. This is its great attraction.
Marc James Roels: We also come from the world of live-action cinema, which is a very intuitive way of working. We’re not particularly good at drawing in a stylized way, so we’re much more comfortable with the camera, the character, the lighting, and everything else. So for us, animation is a more spontaneous way of working.
Emma De Swaef: Basically, it’s like a live action movie but you’re in control of everything. You can decide every little element that goes into the frame, it’s a conscious decision. There is nothing random. And we like this way of working.
Marc James Roels: But still, we like the fact that we can see what the materials are like. There is a kind of balance between what they really look like and what they represent. There is always that tension: you can see that everything is wool, and you can feel how small everything is. But then we show an immense landscape and it forgets you. It’s fascinating, and we like to play with those contrasts.
Animac Magazine: And wool is also a material that comes with many technical challenges. Could you tell us more about it? What are the biggest challenges you usually encounter during a shoot?
Emma De Swaef: There are two big challenges. The first is that wool, of course, doesn’t stay put – it moves constantly. And the second is that it is not a very flexible material. But these challenges also have their advantages. When the animators manipulate the puppets, the wool moves a little and creates its own style: this constant wind that moves the filaments and makes the characters seem alive because you can feel the animator’s hand. Regarding inflexibility, we are working on it. Now, luckily, our characters are no longer nudists (as they were in Oh Willy…) and in our new medium-length film This Magnificent Cake! they all wear clothes, so we no longer have a problem with the inflexible bodies of the puppets. And the great challenge of this medium-length film was all the dialogue, because this time we have included talking characters. We had to invent a technique to make it possible: adding plasticine behind their mouths and moistening the wool to make it more flexible to sculpt the mouths into different shapes. And it’s nice that every new project brings a new challenge: we really didn’t know how we would animate the dialogues! And you can appreciate how the first ones are a little rougher and, towards the end, more sophisticated. We hope that with each new film we can go a little further. In fact, we also had problems with water, fog… We didn’t know how to solve all these problems but finally we solved them, you find a way!
Animac Magazine: In terms of mise-en-scène and lighting, your approach doesn’t only come from live-action cinema, but also from documentaries! What mark did all this experience leave when you approach your animations?
Marc James Roels: Even when we were working on Oh Willy… we always had in mind the idea of a small crew, where the camera would always be on the same level as the characters, without crazy camera angles – in short, that the audience could be easily identified. Shooting in this way is the most natural thing for us. Maybe it’s not so imaginative compared to the possibilities of 3D animation, where you can go further, but sometimes there can be a kind of… distance, I think. This is our way of telling stories.
Emma De Swaef: And our rhythm, too. Film people believe that our films are very fast in terms of pace, and animation people that it is very slow. [laughs] There is an interesting example in our film: the pygmy character, one of my favorite characters. For us it was very important that he spoke a remote language that exists in the Congo. So I started contacting my friends in the documentary world, who shot archive footage of pygmies and told us: “in Europe you won’t find a single pygmy”. There were very few, and even in the Congo it is a disappearing community, so we had to find a solution. We were suggested to simply use another African language – “no one will notice!” – but we care a lot about these kinds of details. And finally we discovered a music group made up of pygmies that only comes to Europe once a year! They are singers who give concerts in Geneva and France. So we waited a whole year for them to come back, we invited them into the studio and we recorded all the dialogue with them. And, since they are singers, we thought: “Let them sing a song!” And we included the song in our film. This is the magic of the documentary: you never know what you are going to get, you invite reality into your home and it offers you gifts. We are very happy and proud of the scene where the pygmy sings to the dog.
Animac Magazine: It’s wonderful. We are curious about your experience in Japan – where you both enjoyed an artist residency in Tokyo. What project did you develop there? And how was your experience of working in such a different country, where stop motion animation is not the most traditional technique?
Marc James Roels: It was an incredible experience. It was difficult to do stop motion, so we used that time to develop the idea for This Magnificent Cake!, and started working on the script. But during our stay, we saw so much and explored ideas for different pieces – we actually ended up producing those first for a whole year, and then we went back to This Magnificent Cake!
Animac Lleida: How long have you worked on This Magnificent Cake!?
Emma De Swaef: A long time. If you count from the initial idea to now, six years have passed. A lot of this time was spent writing and financing the film, and we’ve been in production for the last two years. Six months of construction in France, eight months of shooting in Belgium, and the rest post-production and sound – that was a really long process. You start with nothing but the vocals, and our sound engineer – Bram Meindersma, a very talented Dutchman – started designing the whole sound. In fact, he also comes from the documentary world! Sometimes animation people focus exclusively on foley (sound effects) and music, but Bram focused on creating atmospheres and soundscapes. And, luckily, he also traveled a lot in Africa to shoot documentaries: he knew that he would come to work on our project so he was capturing all those sounds of Africa, on the spot.
Animac Magazine: When you work on stories, what comes first? Do you start with a character, a theme, a setting…? We would like to know more about your writing process.
Marc James Roels: In This Magnificent Cake!, the starting point was the setting. We wanted to set the film specifically in colonial Africa and capture those times. We read a lot of books set in that era, obviously like “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad. Or the works of the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a very controversial writer – he was very anti-Semitic – who has an autobiographical book called “Journey to the End of the Night.”
Emma De Swaef: The character is an army deserter who gets lost in Africa to hide.
Marc James Roels: It’s the way he describes his experience: everybody is dying, all the horrible Europeans running away from something…
Emma De Swaef: And they’re all drunk and drugged because no one can handle the extreme weather in central Africa.
Marc James Roels: The Heat, the Fever, the Sickness… It’s a book we could work with. But in fact, all the characters and the story came much later. First we wanted to work without a story: just bits of people doing things, something a bit more experimental. Until we miss the presence of characters, tell a story!
Emma De Swaef: So we took our five favorite stories, we merged some of them, and then we developed five different stories that were connected to each other.
Animac Magazine: How can you combine topics as serious as colonialism and post-colonialism with comedy? Because, after all, your medium-length film is full of politically incorrect humor! Is humor important in your work?
Marc James Roels: Humor is always very important in our work. Humor is a way to disarm people and make them feel more open to seeing something beyond. Because when people laugh spontaneously, they feel an emotion directly but at the same time they face a very harsh reality. When you see really inhumane things happen to people, I think it’s more impactful if it’s mixed with humor. Because if you just mix it with drama, it has a distancing effect – it’s happening to someone else. Humor makes the audience more aware. You laugh and then ask yourself, “Wow, why am I laughing?”
Animac Magazine: There is also a certain magical realism present. Where does it come from? You also explored it in Oh Willy…: something that could start as a realistic story and then go much further.
Emma De Swaef: I think it’s part of the Belgian character. [laughs]
Animac Magazine: Really? Do you face pain with surrealism or…?
Emma De Swaef: We don’t consciously think about it when we make our films, but when you look at Belgian artists you find all this Belgian surrealism. This kind of humor is very Belgian, it’s part of our tradition.
Animac Magazine: It’s bittersweet. There is a strong feeling of guilt.
Marc James Roels: It’s a subtle and disarming way of confronting the public with these kinds of issues.
Emma De Swaef: I also think that the public is not used to seeing a film like this, where we are talking directly about colonial history. And it’s not about the typical white character who lights up and goes to help black people. Normally, this is the gateway for people to see these types of films, and they are easier to digest because they make you think: “we were actually the good ones!”. There is none of that in our film. We make sure that we can maintain a balance. It confronts you with your past. It’s not easy to look him straight in the eye.
Animac Magazine: We would like to know more about your commercial work, which you are combining with larger projects. What opportunities does advertising give you to explore or experiment? What kind of challenges do you encounter?
Oh Willy… from Marc and Emma on Vimeo.
Emma De Swaef: Well, commercials always have to happen very quickly, so we’ve developed a different puppetry technique – which has been around for a long time. We animated the characters with sticks in a real environment and then digitally removed the sticks. Filming goes very fast, while post-production is slower. Still, it’s nice to work on real sets and explore different styles of animation. The ads we’re most proud of – for example, The Garden Ape – were ads with no budget. We made them because we liked the initiative – The Garden Ape was a nature awareness campaign promoting green spaces in Belgium – and so you get the freedom to do what you want.
Marc James Roels: Ads with bigger budgets are more interesting financially, but there’s always a big committee behind them that wants to know what’s going to happen with their money at all times. So the ideas are diluted. It’s not really something we really enjoy doing, but sometimes it’s necessary.
Emma De Swaef: It helps you pay the bills!
Marc James Roels: We also have our wrestling piece, with two little wrestling characters. In fact it is an idea that came from Japan: we went to see a sumo match, we saw those men fighting and we thought: “we can do something like that!” We had enough budget to buy the lighting, and we built a small set in the basement of our house. We cheer on the little wrestlers and have a great time, but we don’t gain anything from that piece. [laughs] So… yeah, we like to advertise if we have complete control.
Animac Magazine: One last question: what comes next? Any new project in mind? Are you going to take a break?
Emma De Swaef: We already have the spark of a new idea. It’s what makes us happy now: we don’t have to think too much about our latest movie, we don’t like to obsess about it and we just get excited about new ideas. So we are brainstorming whenever we have time!