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Ten Animated Films: The Threatened One

Ten Animated Films: The Threatened One

By Signe Baumane

United States 4 minutes 1999 English

Synopsis

A man has fallen in love with a woman and he laments that the world that used to matter to him is now gone. There's only one being in this life that now truly matters.

A Note From The Filmmaker:

I had just finished Love Story and saw it make the festival circle. Oh, what a roller coaster it can be, sending a film to festivals and getting rejected or accepted. In January 1999 I went to Sundance with Bill Plympton's I Married A Strange Person crew (I worked on the film - if I remember correctly I was a production manager for the film). We had a great time - parties, skiing, films, more parties. After the festival was over, I was $600 poorer and felt I made no meaningful business connections, except for meeting some very nice people and making friends with them.

Some eight months later the mysterious Pierre Poire, whom I met at Sundance, called from Italy and asked me to send him my LOVE STORY, which I did. A few weeks later he called again, said he liked LOVE STORY and invited me to be part of the project he was producing, "one poem each week", which meant 52 short poetry films had to be made by 52 different filmmakers. I was chosen to be one of them. The budget wasn't big, but the given freedom-unlimited.

I have been always crazy about Jorge Luis Borges' work, so to chose a poem was really easy. The next step was to memorize the poem, then lie down in bed. In the stage between sleep and awake, a series of images pass through my head. I have to be alert and relax simultaneously - like a cat in front of a mouse hole. You can't fall asleep but you can't be too alert either - otherwise you start to command the images instead of just letting them flow.

In few days I faxed the storyboard to Pierre. I guess that is the most exciting part of making an animated film - to come up with the storyboard. The rest is grueling work.

After four months of 12-16 hour days, the film was completed and I was diagnosed with an ulcer, which was a nuisance because it was about the time to start NATASHA - my first and only collaboration with Josh Rechnitz.

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