Foxed an Interview with director James Stewart

Foxed is a stop-motion Film by James Stewart and Nev Bezaire. Filmed in stunning 3D, director James Stewart crats a cautionary tale about child labor, growing up in an environment of parental control and how children are often mis-portrayed in the eyes of their parents. Show Me The Animation have been lucky enough to catch a peek of the beautiful film first hand and we urge you to catch it at a film festival if you can. In the meantime you can read about the film from director James Stewart below…

Where did Foxed! come from?
I had seen Coraline and was fascinated by the prospect of telling a story in 3D stop-motion. Foxed! was written by Nev Bezaire, who I met after shooting one of the first 3D commercials. The story was intriguing, and animating in stop-motion seemed like such a great creative challenge, especially after discussing doing it in stereoscopic 3D. From there, I decided to start with the short version before embarking on the feature length, and chose to build it not only as a proof of concept, but also as its own contained, stand alone short story.

How would you define the dominant heme of the film?
Foxed! can be dark and scary at time, but I wanted to keep the material appropriate for a younger audience. So Foxed! as a short film touches on a lot of themes despite its running time. here are obvious parallels with child-labor and human rights, but the idea of children being invisible to their parents is perhaps the central theme. It’s a very relatable concern – the fear of being replaced. In Emily’s case, the substitute is a fox that her mother like more than her!

Stop-motion has a rich cinematic history. How was it directing for the first time in this field?
In live-action you direct actors. With stop-motion you direct a process. A lot of the work in stop-motion is done in pre-productions. Storyboarding and fabrication become your main storytelling tools long before you shoot frame one. So n that way it was very intense. But you alos lack the energy that an actor brings to a character. Athena did some great work in the voice booth, but conveying Emily’s emotions and reactions to the audience is largely the job of the animator. It is a meticulous thing to direct but it also gives you a huge amount of control. Overall the experience was not without its difficulties, but I found it enjoyable and a great learning process.

Feature stop-motion is notoriously budget and time intensive. What was your experience of scaling back these element for a short such as Foxed!?
When we decided to make Foxed!, we looked at all sorts of options for keeping the process manageable. Using wired mouth kits meant that we could create all of Emily’s facial expressions using just four interchangeable pieces, as opposed to traditional films which might us over 70 different mouth kits to achieve similar results. It was very much the design of Foxed! to be a smaller scaled story, but we were no less interested in pushing boundaries where we could. We filmed for 52 shoot days on one stage.

What benefit does the use of stereoscopic 3D give to viewers?
The thing about 3D is that we can use it to really immerse our audience into the world of Foxed!. The film becomes that much more affective when the audience feels they’re in the cave hiding with Emily. Our sound experience is 5.1 surround and 3D allows us to wrap our visuals around the audience as well, so you have surround sound and surround picture. It’s all about heightening the connection and emotion we want viewers to feel towards Emily.

That must have led to some technical and creative challenges?
We filmed the 3D process with a small motion control unit. Our animators would advance the action and the camera position one frame and a time. The camera would take a photograph, then slide sideways to take the second eye view. In typical 3D productions you have two cameras running at once, a small distance apart – thats your interocular distance. With Foxed! we short with one camera, and, because everything is scaled way down we were shooing at interocular distances that were really only millimetres apart. Even though we were making adjustments on such as small scale, the translated effect on a cinema screen is actually massive. Juggling the scale of the project was definitely a challenge. At the end of the day, the audience will hopefully never become aware about this with watching, they’ll just sit back and enjoy the story we’ve told for them.

What’s next for Foxed!?
Foxed! has been written as a feature length film, that has always been the intention. Next for Foxed! is taking this conception from spark to reality. Look for the feature length film to be making waves in the future.

What can we expect to experience within 90 minuted of Foxed! that we did not get in the short?
You’ll have to see the film to find out!