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| Scale Photo: Festival de Cannes |
A seasoned animator who loves to use animation to tell challenging stories, Joseph Pierce, whose A Family Portrait played at the Edinburgh International Film Festival back in 2010, had a breakthrough last year when his latest work, Scale, which screened at Cannes 2022, qualified for Oscar consideration. An adaptation of a short story by Will Self, it was never likely to get a nomination, being a little too edgy for the Academy’s liking, but it nevertheless succeeded in putting the Greenwich-born filmmaker on the map. I met him at a gathering of animators who were discussing their work, and he explained why, in this case he chose to use rotoscoping.
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| Scale |
“Scale is the story of a morphine addicted writer who loses his sense of scale,” he explains. “I picked this story because it appealed to this particular style, which is a very loose form of 2d animation, rotoscoped animation. The short story really plays with the idea of perspective and scale and distorting reality, so it really appealed to this particular technique, which I suppose I see as kind of internal dialogue.
“What the character is thinking and feeling bursts out to the surface, and this might be through a gigantic nose or a big tongue or something a bit more abstract than that. So yeah, we messed around a lot with where we'd put the camera and a lot of different kinds of morphing techniques so he can grow and shrink as we please. It had this kind of hallucinogenic feel.
“I wanted it to be quite an authentic portrayal of addiction, because although it's animation, I wanted it to be quite sincere. So luckily, I've had a good response and people seem to be able to relate to it, even though it's this very strange subject. I suppose it's about the relationship between creating stuff and addiction, which is a very fine line and can be inspiring, but also very corrosive as well. And you can have a lot to lose.”
His inspirations went beyond the original source material, he reflects.
“I looked at a lot of different sources, so I read other books by the beat generation or authors like William Burroughs and Philip K Dick and JG Ballard. These kind of sci-fi/distorting reality books, kind of bastardising the world around us. That was quite inspiring. And also, I suppose, books like Alice In Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels and these things that have very vertiginous themes around them. I did also break my leg during production, and so I was on morphine for a week, which was good research. It was very moreish.” He laughs. “Luckily, I came off it, but, yeah, that was my only first hand experience.
“I had a very solid grounding because the writer has a history of addiction, so he wrote from his own personal circumstances. So I always felt secure that I was telling something which was quite believable and quite real.
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| Scale |
“It really spiralled in a way because we knew we would need a big team based on my technique, which is very time consuming, so we needed to find animators and illustrators and background artists to build this world. So I really started in France to use the French funding system. That sounds quite parasitic of me, but I worked closely with my French producer and then we expanded it to teams in Belgium and the Czech Republic and back in the UK. So it was really a very Euro project, in a way. It was a big team effort, and I was lucky enough to have about eight very talented animators to create the character animation. They were much better than me in the end, so worked out well.”
There's a deep understanding of the experience of opiate use in this film, I observe. Does he hope that it might help people to communicate across that barrier of experience by understand how different the world can look, and priorities can be, from each side?
“Yes,” he says. “I think some of the most gratifying feedback I’ve had is from people who have experienced addiction directly or through a loved one. I have been asked to present the film a few times at hospitals, for recovering addicts, which is very humbling. I hope the film can start conversations!”
