Every year at SpiritClips, we produce a Christmas-themed short film to celebrate the holidays. This year I directed a short motion comic entitled, “Without A House”, for this special purpose. (The film is behind a pay wall on the SpiritClips site, so please email directly if you’d like view it in its entirety.)
“Without A House” is about a father who doesn’t lose his Christmas spirit during the Great Depression. I chose the motion comic format for this story because 1) it allowed for many period locations and 2) hundreds of extras without an extravagant budget. I was also excited to take some risks with the visual style after producing two other motion comics for SpiritClips. (You can see one of them “Ladder Six”, here).
Alice Rutherford, a good friend of mine, came on board to do the illustrations. She has a beautiful, feminine style of drawing, which is quite different than the graphic novel-style illustrators we’ve used in the past for motion comics at SpiritClips. Below are some of Alice’s final images that were used in the film.
For the look of the shots and choreography in “Without A House”, I turned to Busby Berkeley’s 1930s films, especially “The Gold Diggers of 1933″, for inspiration. “The Gold Diggers of 1933″ is a musical/comedy about a group of Broadway performers who try to put on a show during the Great Depression and the hijinks and romances that ensue. Berkeley was famous for his choreography and inventive use of cameras; his techniques still hold up even today.
I’d like to share with you a clip from “The Gold Diggers of 1933″ that inspired some of my shot choices in “Without A House”. It’s the finale of the film; the Broadway show is finally played out on stage to the audience. The plot has been neatly wrapped up and this clip serves as an epilogue. Though “The Gold Diggers of 1933″ was made during the height of the Great Depression, there are no overt political statements in the movie…Until this song, of course. It’s one of the most haunting and subversive pieces of film I’ve ever seen.
I hope you find it as creatively inspiring as I have.
[...] I had the pleasure of working with my good friend Tyrrell Shaffner, filmmaker extraordinaire and Executive Producer at SpiritClips, on a holiday-themed short film. I created drawings which were then animated by the talented Mika Tanisaki to produce a motion comic of Tyrrell’s sweet story of a man struggling to give his daughter a happy Christmas during the Great Depression. The film is viewable here but requires a SpiritClips membership, so I’d like to share some of my illustrations below to give a taste of the project. Tyrrell also wrote a great post about the inspiration for the film on her blog. [...]
This is cool!