Here we introduce Amanda & Sushi’s house, known in Japan as a minka. As James enters their world, we slowly fade in some color. This will be a theme throughout, to reinforce some generational and cultural contrast between James Bondáge and the contemporary characters he’s about to meet.

This was the first set I built specifically for this film, after being inspired by traditional Japanese architecture. Because my studio is tiny, most of my custom sets are 2x4x2 foot boxes constructed from plywood with removable walls, either painted or covered with tiled textures printed on paper.

The minka’s translucent rice paper sliding panels are backlit, which really makes the scene work with the color palette I designed. All the props you see were carefully curated for scale. The ceramic work on the patio is a fantastic test piece I bought from an old neighbor for $60. The cherry blossom tree is plastic, which drives home the very nature of this alternate universe.

POSERS is a prop-driven film. That means during a year of writing the script, if I could find an intriguing prop, I tried to find a way to write it into the story — no matter how absurdly.

And yes, those are giant murder hornets buzzing about. They were extremely difficult to animate because they kept falling apart! More on them later…

This was the first shot I did in POSERS. I thought it would be just an experiment to get the feel for animating these Phicen bodies, but the first take came out good enough to keep.

An aging James Bondáge ambles into frame, does a double-take at the camera, draws his gun and fires. But then he collapses from an apparent heart attack.

The 1:6 walker was custom made by NorthernLightsMinis, and I added the tennis ball feet from a plastic necklace I sourced separately.

I animated James falling solely by balancing his body, without any rigging. That wasn’t easy on a 24” round mirror floor, but it came out way better than I thought. When he flings the walker away, I did that by suspending it from green fishing line and then Photoshopping the lines out in each frame.

My original script called for James to fall through the moving matte hole, and virtually into the viewer’s lap, and then get dragged around a bit. But to do that, I realized too late that I should have printed and cut a physical matte to perform that trick with actual physics rather than try to fake it all in Final Cut Pro. Maybe someday I’ll redo it that way?

More comedic small talk while James adjusts his “Hello Titty” mask.

Annette Pardini made this mask using a special form of papier-mâché. I chose the graphic, then she made a few prototypes until landing on a solution that would be malleable enough to animate merely by poking and prodding it with a pointed wooden stick. The only problem was the threads used for the straps tended to fray and that became visibly out-of-scale in 4K. So the solution was for me to simply replace the straps with fishing line. We could have used elastic thread, and maybe should have, but the nylon monofilament had some good properties too.

This solution made James appear to be talking and breathing along with the dialogue, without animatable mouth parts.

This was all part of my original plan to use the pandemic to my advantage. But the longer I’ve worked on POSERS, the more I came to realize it ultimately doesn’t matter. We get that these puppets are from another universe, and maybe they don’t need to communicate like humans.

We’ll learn more about their species later…

One last thought here. If you’ve ever seen Robot Chicken, you know how corny it is to slap mouth and even eye stickers on a doll to make it appear to talk. That’s certain a style, but it’s not the style I’m going for here. If I ever decide it’s important to animate their faces, I can do that digitally given enough time. My tact, instead, is to focus on communicating largely via body language from the get-go and see where that leads.