When director Dean Fleischer Camp and his co-writer and star Jenny Slate made their first short film of “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” in 2010, they couldn’t have imagined its impact: over 32 million views on YouTube to date. , with another 11.3 million and 4.6 million for the two follow-ups. Those short films have now been adapted into a feature film, an idea that was both tantalizing and terrifying, and presented numerous challenges of technical know-how and enormous scope.
“It was day and night, production-wise, because I was alone in my bedroom in the shorts,” Camp said in a Zoom interview. The feature film was something completely different: a crew of about 500 filmmakers and technicians, who worked together for over a year. The director feared that expanding the scope and size of the production could rob the project of its original, low-fi, low-budget charm. “I think especially with processes that are really technical,” he said, “you can very easily lose the authentic, organic thing.”
The technical process in question is stop-motion animation. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is just that – a one-inch hermit crab shell with a pair of tiny shoes. His movements are created through one of the oldest film processes available, in which a series of still photos, with the smallest movements in between, gives the impression of an animated object.
“Those original shorts, I just kept the camera still as much as possible,” Camp admitted. He could do that for those short spurts (they run three to four minutes each). But a full-length story would require more movement, more locations, and more interaction with other characters.
“The big technical hurdle is how we can actually achieve the integration between the live-action world and the stop-motion world,” explains animation director of the film, Kirsten Lepore, via Zoom. “So we had to figure out a lot and we explored a lot of different ideas.”
According to Camp, that meant a bit of cross-pollination. “The specialists never really intersect,” he said. “And so it was about getting these bits of information from different groups and then having those two different departments hold hands.”
It made for an unorthodox production to say the least. The scripting process was unusual in itself; Because “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” is structured like a quasi-documentary, Camp and co-screenwriter Nick Paley wrote the script in spurts, coming together for a few days at a time to write dialogue scenes before collaborating with the other co-writers. screenwriter Slate, who voices Marcel, and the film’s other voice actors.
They kept those sessions loose to capture variations and improvisations, which they would edit into audio scenes before moving on to another part of the story. “So by the end,” Camp said, “the audio is essentially locked. We basically came up with a completed audio game and a scenario at the same time.”
But creating the visual accompaniment, mixing “real” live action with stop-motion animation, came down to “two shoots, essentially,” Lepore said. “It was like a full live-action shoot, then a full stop-motion shoot a year later. So actually filming twice.”
First they would create what’s called a live-action “plate”, with the action of each shot minus Marcel and other stop-motion elements or characters – but carefully approach the focus to where Marcel would eventually be (Lepore was on set, with a marionette of Marcel on a stick).
Later, on a stop-motion stage, they projected that clean sheet behind the stop-motion objects, making an effort to recreate the exact exposure of the original shot so that all the elements would match. “Our stop-motion photography director took meticulous notes on every single shot,” said Lepore. “He was doing overhead diagrams, he was out with tape measure, like how far is this light from the character and from the set and everything.”
This was the laborious process for shooting where the camera was locked to a tripod. When adding camera movements, the process became even more complex — camera movements were digitally tracked when creating the live-action record, Lepore said, “and then that camera movement is translated into motion-controlled cameras that display that data on the stop-motion stage, and then move.” a motion-control camera, frame by frame, through the exact same movement.”
The format of the film, as with the original shorts, is semi-documentary; Camp appears on-screen and as an off-camera voice, interviewing Marcel and capturing ready-made footage of the grenade’s daily life. So that was another complication for the filmmakers: creating a sense of documentary spontaneity within the painstaking animation project, as well as replicating visual cues from the form, especially hand-held camera work.
After failing to digitally create a handheld look, they also used tracking and motion control for those scenes. “You feel those very subtle rotating things that just… happens with the natural camera movement,” Lepore said. “And then we just had a bunch of tracking marks and dots.”
It came down to a “really, really crazy way to make a movie,” Camp said. “I’ve always thought it’s some kind of David Blaine trick where you’re like, oh, there’s no trick here. The trick is that you put in thousands of hours.” Lepore said she agreed with this philosophy of “just crazy, meticulous planning.”
“Everything was done shot by shot and under a microscope – to hopefully give the feeling that it was effortless.”
