Persistence of Vision Journal

AFS' journal, Persistence of Vision, explores a wide range of issues relevant to cinephiles and filmmakers alike. PoV is available FREE to members and also on a limited basis at a number of local coffee houses, theaters, and eateries.

Read the Austin Studios cover story here, including additonal behind-the-scenes photos not included in the print issue!

STUDIO LO-FI SCI-FI
By Mike Dolan

There is a fairy tale element to film studios. The buildings are huge, often resembling — or in the case of the Austin Studios, actually originating as — aircraft hangars. Inside, anything is possible: you could walk through the massive doors and be in Paris or the jungles of Vietnam, or you could stand in front of a gigantic green screen and be sent to Mars. This is the particular brand of magic that occurred this summer, as local animator Geoff Marslett's film Mars became the 32nd feature shot at Austin Studios. Marslett and his Austin-centric cast and crew, including director of photography Jason Eitelbach and actor Mark Duplass, shot the entire film in front of the 40 x 20 ft. cyclorama green screen that was installed last year to shoot a children's safety video starring John Walsh, host of "America's Most Wanted." "The studio is so large that we can have our entire production there," Marslett said a few weeks before production. "The cyc wall has no corner where the wall meets the floor, and that makes it so easy to key out the background when animating the film. We're thrilled to be shooting in the studio." Marslett has always blended science and art. As a college student, he bounced back and forth between a heavy math/physics path and filmmaking. By graduate school, in UT's RTF department, he had chosen the film route, and his drawing talent and tech-savvy disposition made it easy to gravitate toward animation.

Marslett's animated short Monkey vs. Robot, a clever hand-drawn battle for evolutionary primacy, was a major success: programmed by the roving animation presenters Spike and Mike, the short played on HBO and PBS and at more than 70 festivals worldwide. As Marslett's animation style evolved, and he looked toward making a feature-length project, his science background dovetailed with his film vision. He wrote a homegrown DOS-based animation program that processes images in a Rotoscope fashion similar to Bob Sapiston's work in Richard Linklater's films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. The visual look he was shooting for also drew on Robert Rodriquez's film Sin City for inspiration. "I wanted something that was halfway between the hand-drawn graphic-novel look of Scanner and the fully processed realism of Sin City," Marslett said. "My program processes the color palette by reducing the colors in the footage, but it also has hand-drawn detail work on top of it for eyes and outlines. The backgrounds are all totally hand drawn environments, which gives us a lot of flexibility."

The irony that his two chief sources of inspiration basically come from the same zip code is not lost on Marslett. "It's funny," he said. "If those films were made in Bangladesh or Hollywood, they would still be the aesthetic that I like. And because of the work they have done, Austin is getting a reputation as a being on the cutting edge of animation. That has definitely helped me find support for my film."

Marslett gave his invention a test drive last year by making a short titled Bubble Craft, a dreamy office fantasy piece set to a song by the art-rock band Pilotdrift. With Mars, his program and workflow will get a major workout, thanks in part to a recently devised formula for how to get his first feature made.

"I'm going to write my own book on how to get your first feature made," he said, looking pretty relaxed for a man cranking on the Rubrik's Cube known as pre-production. "The first thing you do is book a studio and give yourself a start date."

Of course, shooting an entire film in front of a green screen has certain advantages. "That's the beautiful thing about animation," he said. "If it's a character-driven piece with two people on Mars, it's just as easy as a character-driven piece about two people in a coffee shop."

Marslett also believes shooting in a professional studio will elevate the level of production. "It really raises morale. It is so much better than bringing an actor in from L.A. and taking them to someone's garage that's been painted green," he said, clearly relieved to being moving away from what was obviously a possibility.

When asked about how the film idea for Mars was developed, Marslett relayed more of his formula for getting into production: "The second thing you do is decide what it is you want to make a movie about."

For this, Marslett tapped back into the subject that has driven a large portion of his work — the clash between humanity and science, exploration and evolution. "The film is an homage to Mars, and it's a questioning of why we go into space," he said, becoming quite, well, animated. "Why do we even explore, and what do we do when we get there? It's not Aliens; it's a little bit more about why people would do this kind of thing and how they deal with each other."

Following the third part of his formula, "you write a script," Marslett penned the first draft in two weeks. "It's a simple movie, a romantic comedy about two people going to Mars," he explained. "If I had to point towards a general feel, I'd say it's like Bottle Rocket, a movie that is funny, but some people don't think it is funny." The good thing for Marslett is that having actors like Duplass is an obviously big step in the first camp.

As he nears the fourth step of his formula, "you shoot it," Marslett is animating test sequences and making numerous trips to Fry's Electronics. "None of this could be done ten years ago," he said. "The cameras and the memory needed were cost prohibitive. I'm running a prosumer camera that gives me an uncompressed high definition image that goes right into what is essentially a home computer."

Asked if he feels like he's part of the evolution of the Austin animation, Marslett pointed out that if so, his branch is technologically regressive. "I mean, compared to Bob Sapiston's Rotoshop program, what we're doing is very lo-fi," he said. "The graphics interface of my program looks nothing like PhotoShop, it's not user-friendly. There are no slider bars that you can pull back and forth. With mine, you're actually just typing in numbers, seeing how it looks and trying it again. It makes it harder for someone to learn, but we won't have the thousands of animators you see in the credits of most animated features. Hopefully, we'll have animators drawing backgrounds, and I won't be the only one working with the characters."

Rather than being overwhelmed by his Spartan workflow, Marslett is thrilled to be so close to realizing his dream. "Art works that way. Sometimes the best paintings, the best stories, are created by necessity, when you've got constraints," he said. "You can make the film you want to make on whatever budget you can come up with. It's going to make all kinds of stylistic differences, and choices, but if you're really committed to making something, there is always a way to make it happen."

With that, Marslett goes back to work. If he were animated, his legs would be spinning wheels, a flurry of mathematic formulas and animated images would be pouring from his head, and a huge grin would be wrapped around his face.