The
idea of mankind as cogs in the machinery of the universe is as old as
machines themselves. Yet Alexei Petrov gives it a gloss of CG and Russian
sensibilities within a gritty, photo-realistic environment for his film,
"Cags".
DOWNLOAD the FILM HERE! |
"Many
people think the film is called 'Cogs' and has only been misspelled,"
says the 29-year-old Russian native, who most recently worked on the
feature film Night Watch. "But I call it 'Cags' because in Russian,
'Shesteryonki' has a double meaning, suggesting both cogs and slaves.
So I didn't want to just call it Cogs and have it limited to the one
meaning."
Petrov's clock-part characters come to life, meet, dance, race and chase
each other, become as one, and finally stop spinning and die, all while
the universal clock beats behind them, the heartbeat of their existence.
"I was inspired by the movies of the Brothers Quay, and Pixar's
short films. But the main inspiration for the film was
living
in a big city like Moscow. It made me think a lot about people living
in a system." Clock parts seemed a natural way to explore this
idea.
ASSEMBLING
THE PARTS
It
took Petrov six months to make the film, working on it full time."The
main difficulty was story-telling using completely inanimate objects,"
Petrov explains. "It's hard to understand what symbols are useful
[to an audience]. You have to learn to leave the confusing extra ideas
out."
Because of its mainly visual nature, Petrov did not bother writing a
text-based script for the film, but rather went right in for storyboards.
Still, he admits, "it changed a lot during the process because
I got new ideas along the way. I made a lot of preview animations to
test things out, and there were a lot of changes again. But when I felt
it was right, I made the final animation and rendered it in high resolution."
To
get the detail-rich look he was after, Petrov bought three old clock
models to study while modeling his cogs. But the clocks turned out to
be more useful than just visual reference. There are scenes in this
film that feature those actual clock parts.
In fact, the film came very close to not using CG at all. When he first
started creating the film, Petrov planned to use stop motion animation,
and even animated a little of it with those real clock parts. "I
wanted to show real life with real cogs, textures and lights. Later
I understood that I could only get the motion of the Cogs the way I
wanted in CG. That's why I combined CG animation and film. I found it
was more flexible that way."
Petrov came up with an interesting way to combine
his film and CG elements. "I set up a monitor and played my animation
onthat, and filmed it on my camera with the real clock parts in the
foreground." He used the technique again in the scenes with
the clock parts "in jail", sunken in a glass of water. "Using
my camera I got real reflections and refractions of the cogs in motion
through the glass of water." The result is intriguing, yielding
a level of dust, grit, and lint on the old clock parts that stands in
contrast to the shiny, oil-new look of the animated cogs. The shift
in camera focus makes the layered reality even more pronounced, but
because the elements were combined in camera, they co-exist seamlessly.
