The Creators Project on Beasts
The Creators Project produced a series of in depth videos on Beasts of the Southern Wild including featurettes on the Aurochs, cinematography and soundtrack. While you can find them posted throughout our blog, we thought it would be nice to view them all on one page/post. Enjoy! MAKING OF BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD PART I
MAKING OF BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD PART II
SCORING OF BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
MEET THE STAR OF BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
THE CINEMATOGRAPHY BEHIND BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
Below the Line: The Beasts
The New York Times takes a closer look at the 'Beasts' of Beasts of the Southern Wild in this Awards Season Carpetbagger feature:
“The big challenge was always to not make it look like a pig, but to show as much of the actual animal as possible,” Mr. Tintori said. “In some of the earliest versions of the costume, there was too much fabric on top of the animal. But what reads best on film is seeing the light hit the skin and hair and see all the muscles moving. That was something, with our budget, we couldn’t replicate in CG.”
Via New York Times
The Post Lab's Interview with Ben Richardson
Cinematography Geeks! The Post Lab interviewed our very own Ben Richardson about film stock, labs, workflow, and how exactly he went about shooting Beasts of the Southern Wild.
What were some of the visual references that inspired the look of the film? There’s a 1970’s short documentary called Dry Wood, by Les Blank, that had a lot of the palette we were looking for. It’s a real run and gun documentary from the 70s, and I think it was even shot on reversal stock. A lot of the qualities of the Bathtub are present in this documentary. It was one of the most perfect encapsulations of a cinematic version of the world we were trying to create. A key touchstone for the camera aesthetic was the short film shot from a children’s perspective called Jerrycan, by Julius Avery. Obviously after we watched these films a few times and understood what we were getting from them, I preferred to stop specifically trying to make references to them and went back to responding to the world that I was seeing in front of me.
Read in full at the Post Lab.
Benh & Ray on the Creators Project
I have this collection of Cinefex magazines that are all out of print, and they’re from the 80s to the early 90s. It’s completely my secret weapon. They’re magazines I had when I was a little kid that I would obsessively look over before I could even read. I would obsessively look at these pictures and think, this was a still from a film and this was the crazy contraption they had to build in order to pull off that image. But as I got older and learned how to read, the actual articles themselves are just incredibly dense, they go through every single shot in a film like Ghostbusters, or like Indiana Jones 2, Tron… every single effects film that came out in the 80s. There is an incredibly detailed, meticulous, clinical description of how they pulled off that shot, and almost as importantly, everything they did that didn’t work. Back in those days, every effects shot was like a puzzle. You really needed to figure out how to do it. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we’ll just use this plugin, we’ll use this render farm.” You had to start from scratch every time. They were constantly trying to outdo each other. So every time we approached a shot in this film, it was like, let’s just scour through this stack of Cinefex and just see how they approached similar things. There are techniques we used in Beasts that were taken from so many different kinds of films. Like, there’s this one scene where there’s a very low-hanging sun in the back, and I got that from the sequel to Space Odyssey. They described that they had made a painted backdrop, cut a hole in it, and put a light source behind it, and that was a sunlight source.
— Ray Tintori
Benh and Ray spoke to the Creators Project about all the DIY tricks they pulled for the film and give a tour of the temporary Court 13 HQ here.