Sundance Film Festival

At Stein Erikson with Alex Weil, writer director of One Rat Short. You might have seen it at Siggraph this year (where it won best of show) or at one of a number of venues worldwide. Now it‘s in competition here in the shorts program and just missed an Oscar nomination this morning.

I‘ll be rooting for this film. I don‘t normally get involved with assessing content, but in this case the film is so smart about the things I do cover–cinematography, editing, and other tricks of the production trade that I feel a bit more qualified. Weil has for years honed his skills at Charlex, the shop he co-founded and one of NY‘s longstanding, premier post facilities. So Weil is savvy without being cynical and his film has the same canny humor.

It‘s also a cautionary tale with a happy ending (the production that is, not the script–the script has a sad ending or more like funny/sad). Weil has been around long enough to remember when people first started talking about making original content in the same facility that paid the day-job bills. You know, like Chris Wedge eventually did with superhuman fortitude at Blue Sky. Weil said he hired some people into Charlex with the promise of making a film too, and then went against the advice (begging) of his young producer and started multi-tasking.

When it became clear there would never be a movie–at least not that way, Weil felt stuck. “I had given my word to a lot of people that they‘d be working on a movie. And no matter how bleak it got we were always working on it in some way.” But finally something had to give. Weil rented a building, moved in key collaborators like Todd Winter (the film‘s DP), plus the sound editor, picture editor, animators, etc.; he stoked the Maya 7.0 and Mental Ray engines and they finally got traction.

Weil himself took the long road from idea to denouement. In the beginning he says he just worried about whether he could tell a decent story. “I know I can give messages–hell, I feel I could swing an election–I have strong communication skills and my organization does too, both technically and aesthetically. I wanted to put that to the test.”

But as any student of animation will recognize, the process of telling an animated story is one of letting go–letting go of characters, jokes, and a million little presumptions, expectations, pet moments, everything except what is essential. Weil says one of the first things to go was the idea of anthropomorphizing. His two main rat characters behave like rats, and not like the ones in Flushed Away. The other two characters who survived the shedding of complexity are a computer bot and a bag of Cheetos. They, like the rats, are also anthropomorphic in gesture and implication only.

Of all the great work on this piece–the layout, camera moves, rigging, I would single out two things: the lighting (Weil says that finding the lighting on the opening subway scene finally gave him the right melancholy tone) and Sherman Foote‘s score, which hovers bemusedly, playfully on the edge of clich� just as the visuals do.

Go see at www.oneratshort.com.

Also see our Siggraph writeup on Weil and One Rat Short.