Croissant

Don’t you just hate it when you get food on your face and your entire concept of reality crumbles?

ACHIEVEMENTS & SELECTIONS

• Broadcast on Canal+ during L’Oeil de Links
• Featured on Vimeo’s curated comedy channel.
• Vienna SFF, Encounters, LOCO, Flatpack, Kyiv ISFF, Austin Comedy SFF

I feel that animation and live action should only be used when they’re most useful. It would have been easy to make this short as a 2D cartoon, but setting this in a live action world makes it more shocking. The aim was to make the film purely funny and have the audience feel the escalation is happening spontaneously. That was achieved through quite a technical way. The actors and their chemistry had to fit with the surrounding. There needed to be some sort of relationship subtext so that you can care about why they’re angry/confused. The transformations looked shoddy but believable. The pastry levels had to increase in the right increments. The roaring torrent of jam had to pull it’s weight as a punchline.

The squirty eyes were made under the wisdom of Chris Randall. I turned up with some pingpong balls, jumbo syringes, tubing and twelve jars of cheap jam. Chris immediately rolled up his sleeves. 

In the script there was no specific dialogue or clear cut emotional ramp until the obvious big transformations. Capturing the spontaneity of the performance took priority so I threw out continuity in favour of building the performances in the edit.  It took about 2 edits to realise this. Up to then, the performance felt consciously cut and snarky. Once the continuity was ruined it was quite freeing to do the ‘croissant choreography’ from scratch, even though this meant removing and adding croissant on most shots. It also meant I could really start experimenting with the rhythm of the edit. The emotional build up of the characters became much clearer too. John Henry’s big nervous energy is brewed up by Tom’s lower key stupidity to the point where you can see why he would crack.

It took a lot of time and we debated whether we should have done things differently. The only way round would have been a day of rehearsals we didn’t have, or tons of retakes which might have killed the atmosphere.

All of my edit meddling led to half the shots needing to be reframed with background plates. That sounds like an unnecessary amount of work, but it gave the scenes a flow by steadily pushing the camera back and forwards on Tom. By the time I’d gone this deep I went the whole way and fixed a couple of continuity errors, rubbed out jam tubes and rubber bands, painted Tom’s face, and made his butter fascinator melt.

Making a jam torrent that would smash into Tom without a ruining the cafe was another hurdle. So we turned Tom onto his back against a green screen and pouring jam from above to give the illusion of lots of gravity defying force.

CAST & CREW:

Performers: Tom Reid & John Henry Falle
Written and Produced by Ian Ravenscroft & Louis Hudson
Directed by Louis Hudson
Director of Photography – Craig Bush
Sound Recording – Pete Styles
Sound Design – Louis Hudson
Model Makers – Louis Hudson & Chris Randall / Second Home Studio
Make up – Beth Lowes
Music – ‘Party Hard’ by Bob Bradley / Matt Sanchez / Steve Dymond / Sarah Wassal.