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“Where on Earth are we going to find a fly who can act?” was a question that I asked myself many times. After sending out numerous casting calls without any response, I decided that there must be another way! After a bit of poking around, I came to the realisation that there were two main options; either create and animate a CG fly, or build a model and stop motion animate it. I went for option two, and embarked on my journey of building a model. After a bit of tinkering around with balsa wood, old joints from MegaBloks figures, and some plastic envelope windows, we had a result:
We then had to actually make it move – this involved setting up camp in a stop motion studio space and meticulously moving each joint, frame by frame. It might sound incredibly tedious, and at times it did feel incredibly tedious, but for the most part it was almost like playing with an action figure – putting it into various poses, except here every pose is recorded for your own enjoyment when you decide to later play it back and see the result of all of your hard work.
And once we finally had all the animation nailed, it was time to composite the images of the fly onto the images of Carl’s lab – essentially making it look like the fly was actually flying around Carl rather than just flying around a green-screen backdrop.
Here you can see how the shots were combined to create a final product that invisibly weaves together infinitely complex ‘filmmaking’ into something that you can just sit back and take in without a care in the world.
As a little bonus, here you can watch the video used to promote FLITs crowdfunding campaign. Largely made before shooting of FLIT began, it’s interesting to see how similar some of the moments turned out:
Now that you’re up to speed with exactly how FLIT was made, take that knowledge and watch FLIT from a completely different angle!