Oct 9, 2019

How Did They Do It? Merging Memory and Archives in the Hybrid Film Uncle Thomas Accounting for the Days

Regina Pessoa likes to misfit. Her two recent short films, “Tragic Story with Happy Ending” and “Kali the Little Vampire,” focus on characters whose strange traits alienate them from their surroundings. In her latest film, “Uncle Thomas,” the Portuguese animator and director turns her attention to a more familiar outsider: the Portuguese animator and director.

Pessoa decided to pay tribute to her relative after Uncle Thomas's death. He was an eccentric, introverted man, obsessed with cataloging every aspect of his mundane life. Although he lived on the fringes of society, he was central to Pessoa's childhood.

Uncle Thomas: This is the first of Pessoa's works to deal explicitly with autobiography. But this work is also an aesthetic departure. Whereas her previous works were 2D animations, this work alternates between 2D animation and stop motion, incorporating both her uncle's extensive archive and his habit of painting on the wall. We asked Cartoon Brew to tell us how she developed this hybrid approach.

Pessoa: I started my animation career using analog techniques. I never studied animation. I studied art and painting for five years at the School of Fine Arts in Porto. So naturally, influenced by my art background, I prefer organic textures and like to explore rich visuals, shadows and light. [My first two works were animated with drawings carved on plaster plates and ink drawings on paper.

For “Kali the Little Vampire,” I was told by the producer that my style needed to be transferred to a digital format. After much trial and error, I found my way and “forced” the computer and software to “work for me” instead of me working for the machine. In the case of Uncle Thomas, my challenge was to combine my analog past with what I had learned using software and tablets, and mix all of this in a coherent way while remaining true to my personal visual language.

[I traveled to my hometown to take pictures and found inspiration for point-of-view shots, for example. I preferred to draw the POV by hand instead of basing it on live footage or a 3D setup.

Thanks to Uncle Thomas' material, I was able to see myself as a small child. Also, shortly after Uncle Thomas passed away, before his house was completely renovated, I did a thorough photographic survey of the house and its surroundings.

Pessoa: Because the film is a tribute to my uncle based on actual facts and events, it made sense to use his notes and objects. We ran several animation tests and continued to experiment with ways to animate Uncle Thomas' papers and objects and to merge this stop-motion with my 2D drawing style until we were satisfied with the results.

I was very familiar with Uncle Thomas' materials, such as his objects, his chart of accounts, and his daily routine. But I had never read his diary. Several years after his death, I ventured to read his diary. Its contents confirmed what I already knew. He wrote down his daily activities in a restrained, polite, and methodical manner with a unique vocabulary, never using vulgar language, even when he was angry with someone. I used several of them in the film.

What was strange to me was that I found two documents in particular. A draft of a letter obviously addressed to a woman, someone I did not know - I do not know if he had the courage to send the letter - and two pages containing a long, fastidious, and obsessive dissertation on the number “7”. I decided to combine both and use this mix in the film to highlight his obsession with numbers and calculations.

Pessoa: [I] wanted to draw animated pictures directly on the wall, like we used to do together when I was little. For the woman on the wall, I used a painting by Uncle Thomas, and for the man, I used a portrait that I found among Uncle Thomas's belongings when I was a little girl.

Producer Julie Roy (National Film Board of Canada) wanted to do something different from previous co-productions. We have a great facility in Portugal and I thought it would be fun to bring in one or two Canadian animators to work on the [wall] scenes. Julie knew Sylvie Torve and Dale Hayward from previous projects, so she suggested they come for three months.

They stayed in one of our houses with their families and animated in our studio. We built a real set with walls and windows, and the proximity to the animators allowed for more dialogue between us, daily discussions about the scene, and a consensus on how to build it. one drawing took 20 minutes to complete, so filming the entire scene took about four days.

Pessoa: We used Photoshop for the 2D animation, Dragonframe for the stop motion, and After Effects for the compositing.

To learn more about how this film was made, see the short documentary (in French) by Arte.