DIRECTORS COMMENT:

 

(From an interview by Shorts Moviefest, Russia, 2006)

I wrote the script to En nattsaga 1 year after my mother died. I then needed to do something beautiful but not denial about my experience. What came out was this story about a family who tries to escape reality using their imagination.

The main thing that I wanted to describe in the film was the feeling of unreal and of beeing unprepared, when someone close to you dies. Because my mother never wanted to speak about her comming death, I was quite badly prepared when she died and when a lot of things had to change.

Though, I do understand a lot that kind of dealing with things. I always hope myself that unpleasant things will go away if I close my eyes and go to sleep.

I wanted En nattsaga to be a ”saga” for adults. Like a hug to people that feel unprotected and scared. Maybe it is a hug to my mother, that was probably very scared herself even if not showing it.

The theme of cancer/family collapse/child tragedy is not being pushed or forced. It goes on in a very human, very delicate way. What are your principles?

I am inspired by children and by children's books. I like the kind of storytelling for children that tells something difficult in a simple way without scaring anyone away. Death is not so interesting in it self, I think, but how we handle it.

How did you manage psychologically?

The fact that I worked as a freelance at the time my mother died made my personal situation very instable. I think, maybe I made the film to make a bad ending in my real life into something positive. Then I met Lars and things improved.

What were the toughest parts of work?

En nattsaga is my first animated film, so I had to learn A LOT to be able to direct it. Because of the huge amount of technology to handle, we were forced not have face movements/mimic. So we could not make the characters look sad or happy, by their facial expressions. We had to express that with body language and music. Most hard to animate in 3D is people walking in a natural way! Head and arm movements are much easier. It is much easier to make a fish or a robot move. The human body is much more complex in it's movements. Some scenes also had to be canceled from the script because we didn't know how to work them out!

How was your film done technically?

The animation is made with key-frames. We filmed all movements before we started to animate, and studied all movements very accurately frame by frame. But we did not use rotoscope or motion capture. The animations are all hand made.

How long did it take to make it?

14 months.