Responses from BAT, directors, Not To Scale
Background: It’s a two-minute film for people who believe cities aren’t made only for cars, and that there are other modes of transportation, like bikes or scooters. If we want to change this, we need to think about space, we need to change the ways roads distribute that space and we need brave people like the main character of the story, Roy the line painter.
Reasoning: We focused BIRD’s short film on that specific line between the cars and the others. Roy is the hero of the story, the one in charge of the line and the only one who can change that balance. That’s what drove us during the entire production.
Challenges: The rhythm of the film. After all, we were making a dynamic film about a traffic jam and a line painter. Those aren’t very dynamic events, and we needed to find an evolution, some reasoning behind the line painter’s decision to change it all. And we also wanted to find a way to create a tension before the resolve, before the line painter cuts the cars and creates a new space. The traffic light revealed itself soon; it was the perfect moment to build upon, to give that feeling of tension, like being at a race.
Time constraints: We had an incredibly tight deadline, six weeks from writing to delivering. It doesn’t get any tighter! Normally, you try to reduce the length of a film with such deadlines, yet we all felt strongly that the story needed time to unfold. It was all thanks to an incredibly talented team that it was made possible. Everyone worked so hard and found clever ways to tackle all obstacles. For example, we duplicated the background characters by changing colors and clothes in order to gain some time in the modeling process. And the texturing process was also made simply in order to focus solely on colors and grain. It was a true labor of love.