We were lucky to grab Shane for a quick interview on his last trip out to L.A., away from film production overseas. The feature film for "9" sounds like a project you're going to be hearing a lot about over the next year or so as this continues to grow. Take a peak. To view clips from the film and updates on the new production check out the official 9 site.
ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 3
Shane Acker
Director, “9”
By phone from Los Angeles
Feb. 15, 2006 / Feb. 5, 2007
Taylor Jessen: Tell me a little about your educational background.
Shane Acker: I’ve always drawn. I was actually a hyperactive kid, and my parents bought me a drawing table to curb my excess energy. So I grew up drawing all the time, reading comic books. My mom had this great set of books from Brian Froud, and some of these great fantasy illustrators, and I would just copy and try to emulate those guys as much as I could, and just draw, draw, draw all day long. And I actually went into architecture at the University of Florida as an undergraduate. I drafted a lot when I was in high school, and that just seemed like a professional degree that involved a certain amount of drawing and creativity. And I actually came out to California to go to graduate school at UCLA for architecture, and I was just finishing that degree and I had a few electives left to fill, and I took a class over in animation. I just fell in love with it! (laughs) I was like, “This is what I should have been doing the whole time.” It just combined all my interests – sculpture, painting, architecture, illustration – into one medium, and then combined it with cinematography and film, and it was just amazing. So I transitioned right into that program.
TJ: Had you done live action cinematography previously?
SA: I was a cinemaphile. We actually studied a fair amount of it in architecture school. We’d studied so many kinds of disciplines in art, media, to try to pull ideas into and inform the design that we were doing. So we had done a lot of film analysis, and I had been introduced to the Brothers Quay, and Brazil, and all these really amazing animators and filmmakers. And that became very inspirational to me as I started dabbling in the animation medium. My first film was The Hangnail. That was my first foray into filmmaking and animation. Then I did Mr. Grenade in the middle of production on 9 because 9 was such a long production. It was about four and a half years, and about two years into it, I said “Okay – I’ll give myself a month. I’ll just do one character, one set, one shot.” Just do something and get it out there – and also help practice the 3D animation I was going to be applying to 9. So those are the three films I did at UCLA. I did a couple live action little things, but they were just class assignments. I didn’t really consider them my art as much as I did the shorts.
TJ: Are those other two online?
SA: Yeah, they’re viewable on my web page. They both went through the film festival circuit, screened on Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted festival. I actually went to Slamdance with The Hangnail, my first film. It had a really vibrant festival life. That encouraged me, and it was very exciting to go up and to be involved with the whole Slamdance / Sundance film festival happening. I got really excited and wanted to do something more professional, more dramatic, something that would suggest my abilities at longform. So that’s when I focused on 9. Not only was it my thesis to fulfill my academic requirements, but it was also a calling card, a directorial piece.
TJ: So if that animation kick happened at the end of your architecture degree, good hell, were you in school for eight years?
SA: Oh, plus that. I must have been in school for about eleven years. (laughs) And I only graduated a couple years ago. But I love studying. And the second time around, in graduate school, it made a lot more sense to me. I finally figured out what it was all about, which is just about buying the time to allow you to focus on what you really want to do. In architecture, it was pursuing the degree, and of course it was a focused study, but it wasn’t until I was in the animation program that I was really like, “Okay, this is what I’m going to make out of it,” and doing all I could in the time I had. Because I knew that I would never get that opportunity again in my life. It was funny – Mark Andrews came and spoke at our school, and he said that exact words. “You guys don’t realize the position you’re in. Believe me, I’m out working in the industry right now, and you’re never going to get this opportunity to do what you want, so make the best of it.” I really took that to heart.
TJ: 9 is such an almost infinitely-realized world, it’s the kind of thing that looks like it’s been preplanned for ten years – vistas that go back and back.
SA: I think a lot of that’s coming from my architecture education – placemaking, and understanding all the different levels of detail that you need to put into a place to make it real.
TJ: It’s populated by such amazing things, too – things that are characters and characters that are things. Where did the story kernel come from?
SA: It’s an amalgam of different ideas. A lot of the ideas came from the characters, but also looking at the hero’s journey in folklore and fable, like Beowulf. In Beowulf, and I’ve mistranslated a little bit, but – there’s this beast, Grendel, that’s hunting this kingdom, and he’s preying on all the warriors. Then Beowulf comes along and outwits the beast rather than attacking it with brute force, which the others had done and failed miserably. He uses his mind. That was the kernel – the idea of 9 coming along and seeing the struggle as an outsider, and being the next version of these dolls, having a little more heightened intelligence, being able to figure out the circumstance and create this series of traps to ensnare the beast and take back the lost souls of the fallen rag dolls.
TJ: I almost don’t want to know the backstory of the thing, because what’s there is so rich in possibilities. Did you have a backstory in mind all along?
SA: I had a loose backstory, yeah. It helps you design if you have that concept of how the world came to be, and why these things are there in that world. It just helps you add another layer. And a lot of that backstory is what we’re developing now in the feature, so I don’t know how much of it I can actually reveal. The idea was, I wanted to make a post-human tale, a story in which the humans have all gone. They destroyed themselves, and all that’s left is the detritus that they left behind in the world. But from that, a new sort of life is forming. It’s a new culture that’s developing this primitive technology out of all the bits and pieces, the mark that Man has made on the world. And that’s where 9 begins – they have these devices that may have been left over from the humans, and they’re trying to figure out how they work and what their logic is. And there’s this beast that to me represents the animalistic side. It’s driven by instinct rather than intellect. These guys are this spark of intelligence, and they’re trying to develop their own technology and make their way in this world, and it’s trying to take that from them. It wants to assimilate and be like them, and that’s why it’s hunting them down, stealing their souls, and sewing their skins onto its back in the hope that it can eventually attain that humanity, or whatever that these rag dolls have.
TJ: A designer can have to do years of work to make a world just so we can peek into it for a few minutes, but the breadth of detail shows that you’ve worked all this out. And even if we can’t guess the ground rules, the level of detail suggests that you know what’s going on, so we can follow you with confidence.
SA: Yeah. I wanted to throw the audience into this world, and give them lots of information, so they’re immersed and lost in the immediacy of this struggle, and they really identify and empathize with the characters and go on this journey with them. And the more times that people view it, the more they see, and they can begin to construct this back story. I put lots of little clues in there to give the audience some idea of what might have happened.
TJ: Does this have a future on home video? It’s so rich in sound and vision, it deserves a nice home theater version with surround sound.
SA: This has been a real frustration for me, because a lot of people have emailed me wanting to buy it. I made the film to share it, and that’s what I want to do. But then the opportunity to develop it into a feature came along, and along with that there are certain restrictions. The rights are now all tied up as we’re developing the feature. So everything’s frozen, and the future is not clear. It’s been at a lot of festivals, and I don’t think it’s actually made it onto any compilations or DVD – I mean, it wasn’t even on the SIGGRAPH compilation DVD, which is a festival that I won.
TJ: The short film has a small crew, and no spoken dialogue. How much of what’s on-screen is your design work?
SA: I pretty much designed everything in the film. What I didn’t do was the sound design, and the music composition. I was very fortunate to be able to work with two amazing artists who really brought a lot to the table. Like you said, there’s no dialogue, so sound plays an incredible part in the story. A few animators donated their time to do some of the animation. When I first started the production, I got a fair amount of friends from architecture to help me build out the sets, just because there’s so much detail that we’re putting in to make that world believable. The library scene, where 9 and the beast have their final confrontation, was done by one of my good friends, an architect. And the flashback sequence which takes place in that post-apocalyptic street, that was another good friend who’s an architect who helped me realize that set as well. Then I was trying to make a deadline for a screening up at UCLA, so for the final push, anybody who was idly standing around at the animation school, I roped in to help me light and finish the animation. But about 80 to 90 percent of what you’re seeing up there is me pushing the boulder up the hill for about four and a half years.
TJ: Your lighting is often stunning. The cinematographer Darius Khondji said he was taught that ideally he should be able to light a scene from one source. A still from 9 on your web site shows the beast about to attack the dummy, and though I can tell you’re using more than one source – the primary is down at the lower right, and there’s a dusky glow from outside, and the beast’s eye is glowing green – it still feels like single-source.
SA: Thank you. There must be close to sixteen lights in that shot! But that’s just stuff to help fill out three-dimensional shapes that you’re seeing. Of course, there’s a motivated light source, which is the light staff down below. Because there is no bouncing of light in 3D – or at least I wasn’t using that technology – it’s all about faking light bouncing off other surfaces and rounding out the forms and crawling around the soft surface. So it’s all very subtle manipulation of low-level lights to fill out the scene and make it more believable.
TJ: I suppose if you went with ray-tracing, you would have been in a whole new world of pain, really.
SA: Yeah. There’s only a few ray-traced elements – not even whole shots, just pieces of the shot. Whatever I needed to do for a story point. If it was something very obvious to the camera, where I needed some refraction or something, I’d put that in. But yeah, I pretty much cut as many corners as I could in the production. (laughs)
TJ: How has it opened doors for you? Obviously there’s the feature opportunity, but what else good has come of it?
SA: The most amazing thing, I think, happened when I was at Sundance. My film was in a screening with some amazing filmmakers that I’ve admired, and had been very inspirational to me as a student. Don Hertzfeldt and Chris Landreth – just this amazing ensemble of artists that, all of a sudden, I’m sharing the stage with, which is really pretty incredible. And then, not only that, but really getting to know them and hang out with them and learn from them. So that has really been an amazing experience for me. And the film getting recognition, and me getting this opportunity to do the feature, and meeting Tim Burton and getting involved with him on this production – yeah, it’s pretty amazing. This little thing just took off and kept running, and I’ve been trying to catch up with it ever since.
TJ: I share your admiration for the animators you mentioned. What makes them stand out, I think, is that they’re not just influenced by animation – these are artists who are just as influenced by sketch comedy as they are by Stanley Kubrick.
SA: Exactly. A big influence on Don Hertzfeldt and his work. And then they translate that into their own work.
TJ: And the reason 9 is so strong is that it works as a thriller, a good standalone piece of cinema. You can drop an audience that knows nothing about it in front of it and it works. One subtle thing I noticed in a later viewing was that in the flashback, coming in and going out it’s grainy and yellow, but in the middle that grain goes away.
SA: Yeah, just to transition the audience into it, and then I think it takes 45 seconds to a minute for it to slowly get back to…it’s still slightly tinted and a little saturated, and a little sepia, but I didn’t want to detract from the drama of what’s happening. And there’s this concept of – okay, if these guys have these camera lenses for eyes, maybe their memories are stored on film. So when we’re going into his flashback, his memory might have been recorded on this grainy, scratchy film. You’re just playing with these ideas as they present themselves, as you’re developing the film.
TJ: What happened as you were finishing 9, and when it finally started making the festival circuit?
SA: I did two years of production on 9 when I was at school, and then I went on leave of absence and just started working professionally. I would take a gig for four months, eight months, and save my money. It’s really hard to work on a short while you’re doing a production gig. So I just saved my money, and then when that was done, I would just not answer the phone, and keep my head low in work until the money ran out, and then pop my head back out of the gopher hole and find another freelance gig. When I came off this production cycle, I was flat broke. So I got a job doing a cinematic for a video game company, and I was just hanging out there for a while, trying to recoup some funds. And right around that time I got picked up by an agency. They started sending me out into meetings into Hollywood, and getting in the room with people and talking with them. I developed a couple of pitches, and pitched them, and they didn’t go so well. (laughs) Then I ended up with this producer who’s really excited about developing a film with me. Through some conversations we started talking about what the back story might be to 9. He really saw something in that, and that’s when I started writing a treatment. After four and a half years working on the film, I was ready to walk away and do something else. But what’s great is that it’s a proof of concept. You show it to people, they get it. “I like the characters.” They understand the world. It’s been such a part of me, and it’s so ingrained in my head that once I started writing the treatment, all these other ideas came out, and I started getting really excited again. And after the treatment was done, we pitched it to Mike Simpson, who’s Tim Burton’s agent, and he got really excited about it, and then got us on the phone with Tim, and pitched it to him, and the rest is history. Once Tim came on board, that’s what really set the momentum going on it. He’s executive producing on the project. So I’m just this kid animator who made this film, and all of a sudden I was in Hollywood talking to producers. It’s been a really fast learning curve – I don’t have training for a lot of the experiences I’m having now, so I’m just winging it, and trying to stay true to what I want to do.
TJ: Where have you been recently?
SA: We are set up in Luxembourg, partnering with Attitude Studio, who’s doing the 3D production. They are a studio out of Paris, with a satellite studio in Luxembourg.
TJ: How big is the crew?
SA: We’re not at full capacity right now, but I think we must be up around 40 people at this point. All the characters have been created and generated and set up and prepared for animation. We’ve done a couple of sequences in animation.
TJ: So everything’s been rigged?
SA: All the characters have been rigged. We’re still halfway through rigging all the creatures. We’re into full texturing and a lot of the major sets have been created. So we’re maybe a little bit more than three-quarters the way through pre-production, getting everything set up so we can go into full-on animation. We haven’t done very much lighting and rendering yet.
TJ: Tell me about all the production companies involved.
SA: Focus is still the main financers, and they’re a wing of Universal. Jim Lemley is our producer, as well as Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov. Timur’s a Russian fantasy/horror live-action director, and he’s done a couple of big films that have crossed over, including Night Watch and Day Watch. Then there’s Attitude Studios, and 9 LLC, who is the client-side production studio, and also LuxAnimation, which is another studio that we’re partnering with that’s in Luxembourg.
TJ: Since DreamWorks Animation fell under Paramount’s aegis, I’ll bet Universal is pretty excited about having some more animated features in the family.
SA: Yeah, by all accounts I think that they’re pretty excited by this project. Focus, actually, has two animation projects coming that I know of, 9 and Coraline. I don’t know if Rogue is tied into that too, but of course it’s all under the Universal banner. This was the first animated project for Focus.
TJ: Is it too early to reveal any of the creatures or situations happening in the film?
SA: It’s all pretty undercover right now. It’s touchy. I don’t know how much detail I can go into. We see much more of the world that the short takes place in. We have a much larger cast of rag dolls now, and they’re on this journey of self-discovery to figure out why they’re there, what happened to the world, and why these creatures are pursuing them. That all ties into the history of the world, as they discover. They wake up, and they’re very confused, and they have to find their way. And as they’re moving forward in their journey, we’re actually going backwards and seeing what happened to the world, and how they’re intimately tied into this struggle that’s still ongoing.
TJ: Is 9, the short film, being incorporated as a single scene in the feature, or will it remain a standalone piece?
SA: The short is still a standalone piece, but some of the events that we see in the short take place in the feature. And some of the props and the environments in the short also reappear in the feature, but slightly modified for this broader world that we’re creating.
TJ: This has got to be really nutty, taking on these new duties and responsibilities. How have you managed? And what exactly are your duties?
SA: It’s been incredibly rewarding, but also incredibly challenging. I’ve moved away from the role of being the artist, like I was in the short, doing everything, and more into leading and mentoring and teaching and guiding others who are doing a lot of the art in the production. So it’s been incredibly rewarding because I get to work with all these great talented individuals who bring so much new to the project, and have great ideas to contribute. But it’s also challenging because I’m always fighting the instinct to jump in there and do everything myself. Because I find all aspects of production to be incredibly rewarding. That’s why I made the short. I really enjoy it. So it’s just finding comfort in sitting back and guiding the whole thing, and pushing things along from that different role. And I’m also dealing with real-world things like a budget and a schedule. There’s good days and there’s bad days, but overall I’m really pleased with the work that we’ve been doing, and I think everyone’s really inspired, and really made it their own.
TJ: Talk about getting from a crew of one to where you are now.
SA: I started working with the writer Pamela Pettler at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006. I can’t remember exactly when we got the initial development money. But I think it was about six to eight months where we were writing scripts, and I was developing the character designs. We did some concept art just to help illustrate and explain the script. It was a challenging script, because it’s a very visual film, and it takes place in a very strange world. So in order to get everybody on board, we found out we had to do a lot of art, and every time we did a new outline, we’d accompany it with a bunch of panels of images that help everybody who’s reading it get into the world and see what we were doing with it. Of course, we had the short, which is a great tool for visualizing where we’re going, but it’s a much broader, more complicated story that we’re telling. So we did that, and after our first draft we got the green-light from Focus. They were really excited with where we were going, and they wanted us to charge forward. Then we went into seven months of preproduction, and we set up a little office here in L.A. I think we were running around 32 people at most, a team of artists and storyboard guys, and our editor and editor’s assistant and all our production staff. We had all guns firing for seven months, where we made an animatic, and did a lot of the set design, creature design, character design, prop design, in-house. And during that process, we started sending stuff to Attitude Studios, and started testing the working relationship, and making a lot of assets. So by the time we went to Luxembourg, we went right into layout, and pre-vis. It’s been a really quick process, for an animated feature.
TJ: You’re in L.A. doing voices. Can you talk about your actors? Have some names been announced?
SA: At the American Film Market they had a little piece in which they talked about a couple of the actors that have come on board. Elijah Wood has come on as the lead role, 9, and we’ve been working with John C. Reilly, who’s 5, the other character that was in the short. Christopher Plummer is a character, 1. I think that’s all the names that we’ve leaked at this point.
TJ: That’s a very good tease. Have Focus or Universal given you a release date?
SA: We are slated to finish production in early 2008. But no, there’s been no discussion about release dates beyond that.
TJ: You can’t release 9 on home video right now because of rights issues – how did you manage to get it into the Animation Show?
SA: I’m not sure exactly how that came about. I developed a relationship with Don Hertzfeldt at Sundance in 2005 when we were there. Great guy. I think he had a certain awareness of the short. So I don’t know whether or not he had expressed interest in it when it came time to program for the next year. Also, Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov are represented by Mike Simpson, who represents Mike Judge. So it’s possible that through them, Mike Judge was able to see the short. I’m not sure exactly how it all happened. So once I started on the path of developing the feature, Focus had options on the short, so I couldn’t release the short on DVD. I really wanted to, but I can understand why they had reservations about getting it out there, and they wanted to hold onto the property. So I’m not sure how the Animation Show deal came about, but I’m really excited and pleased that it’s going to get another life, playing in such a great venue, and get a lot of exposure.
TJ: How much of your year have you spent overseas?
SA: We’ve been in Luxembourg for a little over two months now. We went over at the end of November and started setting things up. It’s so great for both Attitude and for me to be there. I can see how difficult it must be for some of these productions that take place overseas while the creatives are still here in the U.S. So much can be lost through miscommunication. It’s really great to work with the artists. We’re really growing together. We’re integrating, coming together and wanting to do this project and put everything we can into it. It’s inspiring to be over there, working with those guys.
TJ: It’s great that you’re there in person.
SA: It’s all about problem-solving, too, and putting all our heads together to overcome the challenges that we set up for ourselves.
TJ: How long will you be in Luxembourg on this leg?
SA: I’ll be there through animation lock, through the end of November or so, maybe the end of the year. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I want to be where the project is, and where the artists are.
TJ: Are you able to get away weekends and see Europe?
SA: I did sneak away – we had had a couple of weeks off for Christmas, so I sneaked down to Italy, and that was really amazing. It’s also great to be able to go around different places in Europe, because the world of 9 has a real Eastern European feel to it. A lot of the environments are inspired by old Europe. There’s all kinds of great reference and inspiration I can get from being over there.
TJ: Do you have a specific setting in mind? You don’t have to tell me exactly, but I’m interested in whether you’re aiming for a certain place and period.
SA: It’s a mixture. It’s a science-fiction fantasy fairy tale – it’s a bit anachronistic, but it feels a little retro. It’s as if it took place in a European city in maybe the 1920s or 1930s, but there’s an advanced technology, as if at some point in the 1800s it split off from our reality and started developing on a new parallel timeline. So it feels very much like Prague or Berlin, perhaps. There are bits and pieces of famous buildings in Europe, in France. I’m really inspired by place and by buildings, and what they have to say about the culture at the time. Buildings can manifest an ideology as well. The politics and what was happening in the world at the time is also represented in the architecture and the spaces that the rag dolls and creatures inhabit.
TJ: I know Brazil was a big influence for you. It rocked my world too. So many people look at Brazil and think it’s set in the past or the future, but it’s the whole 20th century!
SA: Exactly, yeah. It’s the crazy technology that you see in Brazil, too, that looks old, yet it’s something I’ve never seen before – something somehow tweaked. And there’s City of Lost Children, that’s a fantasy fairy tale, but with a lot of wrought iron and turn-of-the-century industrial-inspired design.
TJ: It’s kind of dopey to ask this about a short that is so rich in detail, but are there any secrets that it holds that no one’s asked you about yet?
SA: Well, I’ve littered it with Easter eggs and shoutouts to a lot of artists who have really inspired me and my studies. In almost every shot there’s a little something that’s referencing some artist, whether it’s Klimt or Matta or the Brothers Quay or Pixar. There’s a Zoetrope, which is the first animation machine. In filling up this world, I was filling it with all these things that have really been inspiring and influential to me. When he’s sliding, he’s sliding on a couple pages of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and the book that he ends up destroying the beast with is actually Beowulf. No one’s really going to notice. Maybe someone will pick up on it. But there’s all these kind of things in there, because they’re running around in my world, in some sense. And I’m sure there’s traces of so many other artists’ work in that film. It’s built on the backs of others.
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