3d comic the chaperone. elisode 4
Neil: We found a guy who did pyro and we had a warehouse for five hours. Did you have someone helping you with that? At one point, you guys are blowing up head-shaped piñatas. It definitely adds a whole other dimension. Photo via Neil Rathbone and Fraser Munden. No surprise that a dude with a blond unibrow is a villain.
It really sets the 70s tone of the whole film. Neil: It’s a big part of the film, of the vibe. The music was one of the most exciting things about the movie, at least related to the 70s. This guy said he had an exploitation band. We wanted an authentic band to do an original score. I was working at an event for Concordia doing video and I started talking to the guy who was working the soundboard. It’s animated too, so it made more sense.įraser: The other big appeal of the 70s is that blaxploitation movies had the best scores of any movie genre of any era. Neil: I would say the movie was equally-if not more inspired-by blaxploitation poster art than it was inspired by blaxploitation films itself. All the visual information from the movie was inspired by that. We probably went through that a thousand times. We thought it would be cool to do a blaxploitation 70s vibe because it’s this badass story about him beating up these bikers.įraser Munden: Quentin Tarantino had a publication house for a while and he has a book called What It Is…What It Was! It’s composed of blaxploitation posters from the 70s. The story is about Ralph, who was one of the first black teachers in the Montreal English School Board. Neil: Fraser and I are big fans of exploitation films and 70s B movies. The story takes place in the 70s, and judging from the number of 70s posters you bought for our old apartment, I can tell you are a big fan of that era. We could do that, but for some reason we were just doing it on our own. We were like cavemen in a cave inventing a wheel when there are people driving around in Porsches. We had absolutely no animation experience. I was spending entire days drawing and doing 20 frames, and with ten frames a second, it’s only two seconds. Neil: You saw when we were living together the amount of time that goes into that shit. There are a bunch of different animation styles for the film, but it’s mostly hand-drawn and hand-colored drawings.
It’s something that we can both do and be consistent, and you wouldn’t necessarily be able to look at it and say, “This person drew this, this person drew that.” In video class we’d pass drawings back and forth and make each other laugh. Neil: It’s a hybrid of my drawing style and Fraser’s drawing style. He was just crying with laughter and I was like, Who is this fucking kid? I guess he thought this was funny, so we started sitting together in video class.īetween your previous film, Vaseline and Pepper, and The Chaperone, you guys have managed to develop and maintain a consistent and very distinct hand-drawn style.
And I just went “uggh” and Fraser started dying with laughter. There were slow moving shots that came close to these wrinkled bodies moving in the water. We were watching a slow artistic video about old people doing water aerobics in a pool. Neil Rathbone: Fraser and I met in video class. I met with Neil and his partner, Fraser Munden, to talk about the film, blaxploitation, their experience at TIFF, and David Arquette’s obsession with their puppets.