Month: September 2021

The post David Squires on… The Sopranos prequel we really want to see appeared first on Little White Lies.

The post David Squires on… The Sopranos prequel we really want to see appeared first on Little White Lies.

The post David Squires on… The Sopranos prequel we really want to see appeared first on Little White Lies.

Sarah Adina Smith and Jonako Donley, the director-producer team behind Amazon Studios’ newest young adult drama film Birds of Paradise, have been making movies together since they shared a dorm room during their freshman year at Columbia University.

It only makes sense that their latest project together — one of many they’ve collaborated on over the years, including Buster’s Mal Heart starring Rami Malek and The Midnight Swim starring Lindsey Burdge, Jennifer Lafleur, and Aleksa Palladino — would be about a pair of best friends who meet at ballet school.

At times trippy and tinged with fantasy and fairytale lore, Smith adapted the script of Birds of Paradise from A.K. Small’s novel Bright Burning Stars. The story follows Kate Sanders (Diana Silvers), an American dancer who earns a spot at a prestigious ballet school in Paris through a scholarship. There, she meets Marine Durand (Kristine Froseth), a beautiful dance prodigy who is mourning the loss of her twin brother. At first, the girls can’t stand each other, but after being forced to share a room, they soon realize they have more in common than they thought. However, competing against one another for the semester’s top prize of winning a contract to join the Opéra National de Paris pushes their friendship — and their physical and emotional stamina — to the limit.

Also Read: Boss Baby: Family Business Visual Effects Artists Give Advice for Aspiring Animators at SCAD AnimationFest

Smith, who serves as the director, and Donley, who produces, were never trained ballerinas like their main characters Marine and Kate. But they did take one very intense modern dance class together while making Birds of Paradise that they’ll never forget.

MovieMaker: This film involves a lot of beautiful dance choreography. Do you have any dance experience of your own?

Donley: Only being drunk together in college and sneaking into clubs.

Smith: Did you ever take dance classes, Jonako?

Donley: I think as a toddler I might have taken a kid ballet class but not really at all. It was funny, we went to a dance class together.

Smith: I forgot about that! Oh my gosh, we did!

Donley: It was at this place in L.A. We were both like, dying. We’re like, ‘We should, like, get into dance!’

Smith: I almost vomited in the dance class because it was so hard. I can be a little bit of a method director, and so I was taking ballet classes as I was starting to write the adaptation. But then Jonako and I went to this place called The Sweat Spot, which was like, I mean what kind of — I don’t know what kind of dance it was, but it was so hard.

Donley: Like, modern dance.

Smith: I had to leave the room, and I was like, my teeth hurt. How is it possible that my teeth hurt?

MM: How long have you known each other?

Donley: We’ve known each other since college, we went to college together. So, since we were 18 and we lived in the same dorm freshman year.

Smith: The very first movie I made was with Jonako’s father’s handy cam. The thing about Jonako, she’s been with me since my most weird experimental days. This was like, I mean, it’s maybe a stretch to call it the first film — it was like one vignette, if you will.

Donley: It was like one shot right? It was like one shot on the beach.

Smith: Naked Serbian on the beach. It was an homage — an adaptation, if you will — of the Tootsie Pop commercial. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the classic tootsie pop commercial.

Donley: “How many licks does it take…”

MM: Oh, with the owl? 

Donley: Yup.

Smith: Exactly.

Also Read: Sci-Fi Gem Ultrasound Was in Pre-Production for One Month and Most of the Film Was Shot in Five Days

MM: How many projects have you made together over the years?

Donley: Have we ever counted?

Smith: I think three features, lots of shorts and music videos, and also we develop TV together as well. I feel incredibly lucky. I know a lot of other filmmakers who are still kind of like searching for their person, if you will, their key collaborator. I felt so lucky that I found Jonako early in my life, and that we’ve gotten to share this experience of growing together in our careers. Birds of Paradise was our chance to cut our teeth with our first studio movie together and to bring up our other collaborators along the way, like our cinematographer Shaheen Seth, our composer Ellen Reed, and so many more people that we’ve continued to work with over the years.

Donley: We sort of call it family-style filmmaking. We have a group of people that we sort of like to collect and bring along the way and it just makes it such a lovely, fun experience.

MM: What’s the origin of the fairytale in the movie about the bird that pierces the sky with its beak to create the stars?

Smith: I’ve been trying to search for the origins of it, but it was from my childhood. I’m from Colorado, and it was from a campfire story that I maybe was told at a summer camp by a counselor or something. That always stuck with me and I truly — I don’t even know to what extent I’ve rewritten it in my mind or if it’s that exact story, but it’s something that I heard when I was really little that just always resonated with me about this notion of going against the powers that be, going kind of against the will of the gods, and this rebellious heart who’s willing to sacrifice everything and reach the highest heights, even to her own peril. And that’s this notion of that’s where stars come from.

Donley: Just in terms of the timing that we made this movie, it sort of feels like an apt kind of metaphor that we really had to push very hard and reach for the stars to finish this film. It was a collaborative effort. There was no way we could have done this in the time of COVID without every single person that worked on this film.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Birds of Paradise is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Main Image: L to R: Diana Silvers, director Sarah Adina Smith and Kristine Froseth on the set of Birds of Paradise. Photo Credit: Amazon.

The post The Women Behind Amazon’s Birds of Paradise Revisit The Most Intense Dance Class of Their Lives appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

When it comes to visual effects, bigger and bolder doesn’t always mean better. Three visual effects artists who worked on DreamWorks’ The Boss Baby sequel, The Boss Baby: Family Business, shared their insights and advice for students interested in going into the animation field during a panel at Savannah College of Art and Design’s 2021 SCAD AnimationFest on Friday.

One of their biggest pieces of advice? Sometimes, simple is best.

“When I was a student at SCAD I always wanted to make my effects look big, look cool, as complex as possible. But when I’m working on the shot… the main thing is to help the storytelling and also try to direct where the audience, the eye, is going to look,” said Jinguang Huang, a VFX artist at DreamWorks Animation who graduated from SCAD in 2017 with an MA in visual effects.

“We always want to get them to focus on the character itself instead of the effects,” he added. “Sometimes we don’t need to make very hard, very complex effects setups. Sometimes, the simple thing is good… because we can easily change the effects and also hit the notes and then get a quick turnaround time.”

Also Read: Sci-Fi Gem Ultrasound Was in Pre-Production for One Month and Most of the Film Was Shot in Five Days

Jim Koonce, another DreamWorks VFX artist who worked with Huang on The Boss Baby: Family Business and graduated from SCAD in 2016 with a BFA visual effects, agreed that it doesn’t always make sense to add on unnecessary work just to make a shot look more complex.

“As effects artists, we tend to want to create these awesome systems and setups. And that’s something you do at school… you start to learn more about the software. You want to make it more robust so anybody could open the file and click one button and make it work,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just easier to just do some simple fix — just keyframe something on and off. You don’t need to make some setup that interpolates distance and uses matrix math to figure out some kind of rotation between two different scales. Sometimes it’s easier to just turn something on and off and get the shot done, I think. It’s good to be simplified where you can.”

Jason Mayer, who graduated from SCAD in 2003 with an MFA in Computer Art and is now head of effects at DreamWorks, says people who are learning animation and visual effects should focus on executing one simple effect rather than biting off more than they can chew.

“One of the things I would urge all of the people, especially students, that are listening here is your scope — your scale of what you’re trying to do. When I was a student, it was always, ‘I’ve got this epic that I want to tell of like, you know, this quest that this person goes on and it’s got to be a 17 minute short and I’m going to do it all myself,’” Mayer said. “The reality is when you get out here, you might have 10, 15 experts — like absolute experts — who spent their whole lives working on each individual one of these things, and that’s how these movies come together. Each person is putting that expertise in, and there’s no one person that is going to be an expert in all of these things. And so scaling that down and figuring out exactly what you want to do and being like, you know what, if I’m going to try to be an effects artist, for instance, I’m going to make sure that I can do a torch, like a perfect burning torch, moving it around, just simple.”

Mayer also gave some insight into what animators what to see when looking at a prospective new employee’s reel.

“As a reviewer of reels and stuff like that, I would prefer to see something that’s really slick and put together and is simple but executed at the level that we would expect, rather than this big, broad, ‘I’m going to blow up this building and then it’s going to set this fire and you start a tidal wave,’” he said. “It’s a trap you fall into.”

SCAD AnimationFest is taking place from 23-25, 2021. Learn more and get passes here. Main Image: A still from The Boss Baby: Family Business. Credit: DreamWorks Animation

The post Boss Baby: Family Business Visual Effects Artists Give Advice for Aspiring Animators at SCAD AnimationFest appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.