“Stop singing and tell me a story!”
The underwater world is full of colours—some say as many as 9 million!—movement, and strange creatures. The ideal environment for an animation artist to unleash her creativity, or is that just a little too ambitious? Especially when you consider that all these animals also sing and dance in a dazzling deep-sea musical! During the Filem’On Festival in Brussels, Czech director Bara Anna Stejskalova explained how she brought this superhuman plan to fruition.
The ocean is paradise for Fran, a gracious yet murderous mantis shrimp. Her deadly claws take whatever they desire. But when Fran falls in love with the blind and hideous fish, Milva, the ocean will never be the same again.
Allow me to present you with a few dilemmas. LA LA LAND or THE SOUND OF MUSIC?
Bara Anna Stejskalova: LA LA LAND.
Why am I not surprised? SINGING IN THE RAIN or MOULIN ROUGE?
Stejskalova: MOULIN ROUGE. We have the theme of ‘forbidden love’ in common.
Are you a musical fan?
Stejskalova: Not at all. I grew up on Czech fairy tales. When Disney films finally came to the Czech video stores, I was surprised by how much singing there was going on. I was like, Stop singing and tell me a story! I suspect that my aversion to musicals originated there, and I never returned to the genre as an adult. But when writing the script for 9 MILLION COLOURS, it became clear that it had to be a musical. I spent two weeks on an island in the Azores, where I went diving with an instructor. I found out there were so many sounds in the sea, from the small pebbles to the big whales singing. That’s when I realised my movie needed music that referred to all those sounds underwater.
It’s very tempting now to quote the Disney song Under the Sea!
Stejskalova: We used that song when pitching at Animarkt in Poland. We wanted to pitch the project in a way that made everybody feel engaged, so my producer, my editor, and I did a karaoke version of Under the Sea, sung into glasses of water. It didn’t really work, but people remembered us, and we won the award. In the original concept for 9 MILLION COLOURS, we considered vocalists singing underwater. We conducted some tests, but the problem was that the microphones mainly picked up the bubbles, while the vocal sound disappeared into a big, bubbly mess. But we used this principle in the sound design, for example, when you hear the characters laughing underwater. Our sound designer took a bullet for the team and went down with his head.
The songs also have an explanatory function.
Stejskalova: In an early phase of the project, I wondered how to explain that the mantis shrimp can see so many colours. I wanted the audience to recognise this as a fact, and not as some random choice made by a whimsical animator. Working on the music design, we considered having her sing about her amazing powers, how she’s a queen, and how many colours she can see! That’s when we decided it had to be a musical.
Are you good at singing?
Stejskalova: Me? I suck! Singing at Animarkt was a sacrifice I was willing to make to get my film made. There were only 30 people in the room, most of whom were animation people, who are a bit weird and quirky by nature, so I felt among equals.
There are two things that animators usually tell me they hate: water and animals with many legs.
Stejskalova: My animators do hate me now! Before 9 MILLION COLOURS, I made the film LOVE IS JUST A DEATH AWAY, in which the main hero was a worm; no legs, no arms, just a body and a mouth. I felt like tuning things up a bit, and we ended up with this underwater overkill. Luckily, Jiří Krupička and Vojtěch Kiss are brilliant animators. We scheduled the film based on my experience with puppets having two, four, or no legs, not taking into account the number of legs of crabs or shrimps. The entire production took about one year longer than estimated, primarily due to the legs, water, and lighting requirements.
Fran is visually a complex character; Milva is rather the opposite, like the simplest form you can imagine. Did both options come with different challenges?
Stejskalova: Animating a character that doesn’t have many features is hard. Milva’s body movements are limited due to her monolithic shape. She hardly has eyes; she can just express some simple emotions through the shape of her mouth. We had three shapes: smiling, frowning, and looking surprised. I wanted her to initially appear in a haze of mystery, so that her character could develop. From a simple, emotionless being, she becomes a more complex individual, making her journey throughout the film.
Even her colour changes. I think I saw her blush.
Stejskalova: That was prompted by your empathy, because that never happened. She probably got dirty because she is made of white silicone, which is almost impossible to keep spotlessly clean throughout filming. The audience doesn’t notice it, but I can even see the tiniest bit of hair or dust that sticks to her for a few frames and then vanishes.
Is it clay that you work with?
Stejskalova: Fran and Milva are made of silicone, the dolphins and shrimps are in rubber, and the crabs are printed in 3D; there were at least 40 of them. Rubber is cheaper than silicone, so we ended up using a lot of it.
Where does Milva’s rudimentary form come from?
Stejskalova: She is based on two different, ugly, deepwater species. One of them is the blobfish, a notorious ugly duckling, but I like the texture of its skin, which we then applied to a different type of fish that basically has Milva’s shape. We gave the eyeless creature a little tale and added the front fins.
Fran has a striking, radiant effect in her eyes.
Stejskalova: Mantis shrimps are amazing animals. One of the coolest facts about them is that they have supervision. Humans have photoreceptors for three colours: red, green, and blue. Mantis shrimps have 16 photoreceptors; they can see ultraviolet, ultrared, and coralised light in a spectrum that we can’t even imagine. Crabs can only see in black and white, but not the same way as we perceive it. I found it fun to mimic and recreate those visions, even though I would always fail, because this goes beyond our perception. The entire character design is based on realistic elements, and all these species truly exist.
With the mantis shrimp as a natural superstar!
Stejskalova: I wanted to make a film with a mantis shrimp ever since I first read about them. They have the coolest features; they are ultra-strong and very territorial. Some subspecies have boxers instead of claws, but boxers don’t look good on film. We combined several subspecies, like the peacock mantis shrimp, which has all the wonderful colours. They are super fast; a punch from their boxing gloves is like a bullet from a gun, so fast that it creates little vacuum bubbles. Mantis shrimps are small, but even octopuses and dolphins are scared of them.
There’s an endless variety of coral, sea pox, algae, and everything… You could have gone on endlessly adding more details. How did you decide what was enough?
Stejskalova: We had the budget deciding that! Many objects were constructed in 360 degrees, so we rotated, reused, or repainted them. We kept some of the puppets for a possible exhibition. We have plenty of coral reefs; I don’t know what to do with them. There’s one thing that we couldn’t give enough visibility throughout the movie: I wanted more pieces of garbage in the image…
I noticed one can on the bottom of the ocean, and I wanted to ask you about it.
Stejskalova: There was so much more, but we made it too much part of the set. Showing how polluted the oceans are was an underlying message I wanted to convey. This sad reality needed to be addressed, without resorting to overly explicit references; if you try too hard to force a message, it often misses its target. I wanted it to be like a question that the audience would ask itself, a slightly uncomfortable feeling that you notice within yourself about why all that trash is there.
There’s a lot of movement in the characters, but what about the motion in the backgrounds?
Stejskalova: The backgrounds are static, but with a bit of motion added. We shot mostly on green screen, and the backgrounds and water level are usually real-life footage that we composited in blue. We used 3D water only for the shrimp’s POV, because, in general, generated water looks kind of misplaced. Another type of movement was added in post-production via minuscule, shifting dots of plankton.
The light, constantly playing in the water and on the sea bottom, adds another layer of movement.
Stejskalova: Together with our cinematographers, we found a satisfying method for that: a projector beaming sun rays on the sea bottom, frame by frame. In the test projections, even though we had a green screen behind the characters, we recoloured the green into blue, which is enough to convince you that you are underwater. There wasn’t much post-production needed. We just added the rays and erased all the rigs. However, the creation of water was a straightforward process.
Did you watch many synchronised swimming videos?
Stejskalova: Maybe the animators did. Developing the choreographies was fun. The crabs were extra challenging, due to those six legs. They don’t really have a body that you can rock, so we had to rock them by their legs.
At the end, we jump out of the water with the characters and finally see the open sky again. It’s a wonderful sky that perfectly blends with the underwater universe.
Stejskalova: I tend to start and end with similar shots, like closing the circle. The film opens in the early morning hours, under a clear blue sky. Then we dive in, going deeper and deeper, until we emerge again, as if the viewer has been on a journey alongside the main characters. These two shots mirror each other, but are set at different times of the day.
What is it about Milva that attracts Fran so much?
Stejskalova: Compared to the other creatures, who look like little monsters, Milva is this white, glowing creature. She’s not monstrous. And because she is not afraid, she lets herself be manipulated. Fran can manoeuvre this life-size doll into any position she wants.
I thought it was about even the deadliest creature being able to recognise and admire innocence, but you make it sound less nice.
Stejskalova: Fran isn’t a nice character! It’s all about manipulation. I would say she’s a bit of a narcissist. Milva is a bit silly and naive, but she’s pure. Milva is like a depressed human being, unable to see the joy in the world. While Fran can be sanguine, she’s happy, highly esteemed, like a boss, a queen bee.
Which of these two extremes suits you best? Or do you consider yourself just a dancing crab in the background?
Stejskalova: Probably, every animator is a bit of a sociopath. Who else would lock themselves away in a cellar, in the dark, for so long?
Luckily, they are locked in cellars! Imagine all those crazy animators being out on the streets!
Stejskalova: That’s why we have festivals, so you can locate exactly where they are.
Do you still eat seafood?
Stejskalova: Oh yes! I don’t feel guilty about it. Do you know those rituals where you have to eat your enemy to make you understand them? Actually, they are not my enemies; I simply like seafood!
Gert Hermans
On behalf of Filem’On