- Animation's really a way
to transpose your audience
into somebody's inner experience,
and that's why we feel
so connected to Alma
because we are actually with her
on this strange visual trip.
We're not sure what's really happening,
just as Alma is not sure.
[pensive instrumental music]
Hello, I'm Hisko Hulsing.
I'm the director and production
designer of "Undone".
And this is how we brought together
classic oil painting techniques
with modern techniques
like projection mapping in order to create
the dreamy, painterly world of "Undone".
[pensive instrumental music]
"Undone" is about a 27
year old woman called Alma
who wakes up from a coma
after a car accident completely confused.
She's being thrown through
different times from her life,
through different places,
through all kind of
weird, dreamlike states,
and at the same time she's being visited
by her father who had
been dead for 18 years.
He says that he came back to train her
to manipulate time in such a way
that she can travel back in time
and prevent him from getting murdered.
So he gives her like the choice like,
"Do you want this boring
life that you always had,
"or do you want to go
"into this spiritual adventure with me?"
And at the same time, her family,
her sister and her mother,
are very concerned.
They think that she might be
psychotic or schizophrenic.
- You need to come with me to this clinic.
- Nope.
[keys cling]
I'm going to Mexico.
- I first use rotoscoping when I finished
a film called "Seventeen",
which I drew completely by
hand, I animated it by hand,
and I also made comic at the
same time and illustrations
and they became more and more realistic
so I was drawing full of
sinewing clothes and wrinkles
and kinds of complicated shading.
So when I stared doing "Junkyard",
a short film that I directed and wrote,
I figured that it would be
way too laborious to draw
in that style and do it frame
by frame for 18 minutes.
So then I decided to film
everything with actors first
and trace the bodies of the actors.
I've never been a real
fan of rotoscoping before.
I didn't want to trace the
faces, so I developed a technique
where I made all the heads from clay.
I filmed them from all sides
and I used them as a
reference for the animation.
It's sort of a mix between stop motion,
rotoscoping, and animation.
And I used the same technique
for "Montage of Heck",
the film from Brett
Morgen about Kurt Cobain,
the lead singer of Nirvana.
I think one of the problems
with rotoscoping in general
is that sometimes it
feels like it's a filter
applied to live action,
and it feels like you're
not watching the real thing.
It's as if you're looking through a filter
and seeing some world behind it.
For me, it's very important
that the characters feel
like their an integral
part of the environment,
so I want to give those characters depth,
and I think that's what distinguishes it
from other rotoscoping.
We developed a technique
to make it feel like
they were three dimensional
instead of just flat figures
and that makes them
more relatable, I think.
I'm really a fine artist.
It's my intuition and I
really want to make sure
that everything looks very beautiful,
or at least as beautiful
as necessary for a shot.
[upbeat instrumental music]
One of my first ideas was
to use real rotoscoping
because I realize that the
dialogues were so sophisticated,
you know, and it was so
much depth to the story
that I thought that an
adult audience would not buy
into normal animation.
They probably wouldn't be
interesting in seeing that
and it wouldn't convey all the
subtleties of the dialogues.
We also used rotoscoping, first of all,
because it's more realistic
approach to animation,
and second of all, it
remains ambiguous in story
whether Alma is schizophrenic
or experiencing some kind of
nightmares or just flashbacks.
To me it seemed that if
we would use rotoscoping,
we would already create
a very unreal atmosphere
while seeming to be realistic.
So for the audience, it's not always clear
when she is experiencing something,
which is completely unreal,
or that we would consider unreal,
or if it's really happening.
And I think the rotoscope helps with that
because even the realistic
scenes seem a bit suspicious
because it's never really real.
So it's a kind of strange
experience for the audience.
That was a guess when we started.
I didn't know if it would work,
I didn't know if it would
get into an uncanny valley
where people would feel
appalled by the characters.
And that was a big
problem in the beginning
and we solved that with
all kinds of details
from the technique.
And I think we found a nice balance
between it looking artificial
and still compelling.
- I can't really move in this dress.
- I know.
- It's really firm, very firm.
- Yeah, it's very tight.
[upbeat instrumental music]
- These are all the
components that are needed
to make "Undone".
Storyboarding, layouts,
floor plans, digital designs,
live action recordings,
editing, rotoscoping,
3D animation, 2D animation, coloring,
shading, and compositing.
One of the most important
things in animation in general
is the storyboarding process
because you're not going
to animate anything more
that what you need so
you need to be very sure
of what you're going to animate
and so I think most of
the directing is actually
in the stadium of the storyboarding.
So for me, I've done it
so many times myself.
You know, I've done storyboards
for over 150 commercials
and for all my own films.
When I read a story, I
can almost imagine it
and I can imagine it to be
visualized in different ways.
I can sort of, in my head I can
turn a virtual camera around
everything that's happening
and search for the best way
to find the best angle for something
and to use visual storytelling in a way
that it communicates
even without dialogues.
So with "Undone" it was different
because it was too large of a project.
There were 3,000 shots
in the first season.
So we get some very good
storyboarders in Amsterdam
and I would brief them
in many different ways,
dependent on how much time I had.
Right now, I'm briefing them
by actually thumbnailing whole episodes.
So I make 400 thumbnails
and then give it to them
so they know exactly what they can draw.
The storyboards are necessary to determine
if the story's working.
It's also very necessary for me,
when I'm on the set with the actors,
to know which angles we exactly need.
Everybody's using the
storyboards on the set
so the DOP, me, the scrip supervisor,
so we know that we shoot
everything that we need.
So another very important
thing for "Undone" especially
are the layouts and the floor plans
because a lot of people think
that we just shot live action
and traced it.
That's not how we work.
We film the actors on a
soundstage in Los Angeles
but there's no actual set.
There's just some grids that we need
to determine the perspective
afterwards for our visual sets.
So what we do, we make sure
that before we film an episode,
we have designed every environment
that's going to appear.
So any room, any house,
any exterior, we design it.
We have a team of designers
and we make floor plans with measurements.
So when we're on the set,
my assistant Nora Hoppener,
she just uses tape on the
ground to show the actors
where to walls are
so they don't cross the
walls when they're acting.
We have some props, like
if some people are sitting
on a chair we need a chair, of
course, and there's a table.
There's a table.
Every prop that needs
physical interaction has to be
on the set, but that's all.
It's really very much like "Dogville",
the Lars von Trier film,
but it's just almost like a play.
The nice part for the actors was that
usually on live action film sets,
most of the time they're
just waiting between scenes
or between setups, camera setups.
They have to wait for
hours and watch their phone
or read a book or something.
And this was completely
different because we could change
between the setups very fast.
There was one day where we did
144 camera angles in one day
because we don't need to
do very complicated setups.
It's lighting and camera, that's it.
So for them, it's almost
like being on a stage
and doing a play for
twelve hours in a row,
which is very tiresome but
it's also very pleasant
because that's what I want
to do, they like to act.
So the whole live action
process is another part,
and a very important part is
the rotoscoping, of course.
So once we film a whole
episode, we edit it,
and once that edit is locked,
it's being sent to
Texas to Minnow Mountain
where there's a studio
that does the rotoscoping,
which is the tracing of the live action
to sort of code it in lines,
to simplify it in lines,
to stylize it while
maintaining all the emotions
that are being conveyed by the actors.
And the lined rotoscoping
goes to Amsterdam.
In Amsterdam, all the other stuff happens.
So in Amsterdam the designers
are based, the storyboarders,
the painters, the 3D studio
animators, the compositors.
The digital designs that have been made
before we went on set,
they're being sent to the painters.
They project those designs,
those layouts on canvas
and then trace it and then
they start painting it
in very traditional, classical way.
It's really a technique
that has been in existence
since the 17th century.
It's called wet-in-wet, or all prima,
where we actually use our
palettes to mix colors
but we also use the canvas
itself to mix colors.
That the thing with oil paint.
Oil paint stays wet so once
you have a certain area
in a color and you mix
another color in it,
you get all these lively gradients
that in a computer would look very sterile
and when you paint it, it becomes lively
and it feels like it has
more soul, to me at least.
Another very important
component is the 3D animation.
A lot of environments were
painted but some of them,
maybe 1/3 of them, they
were projection mapped.
So we would make 3D environments
and then project paintings
on top of them.
So the painters would paint,
for instance, a part of a chair
and that's being projected
on a 3D environment.
And so we could do the whole
house of Alma, for instance.
It has been done that way.
So you can put a camera
everywhere you want
and it still looks painted.
Not completely because
if you rendered that
it's still a bit sterile
because all the corners are too hard
because it's rendered
from a computer program.
But we have digital touch-up artists
who then use Photoshop to
smooth out all the edges,
to use painterly brushes
to make it look like
a real painting again.
And 3D is being used a lot
for the special effects.
There's a lot of special
effects in "Undone"
like whole place is falling
apart and very strange things
that could only be done with
this technique, I think,
because once, for instance,
a whole space transforms
and it was oil painted to begin with,
it should look like that
all the way through.
So that's why we use 3D
animation and projection map,
paint on top of that.
So another very important
part is, of course,
the coloring and the shading.
The shading was by
biggest worry for "Undone"
because for "Junkyard" I
did all the shading myself,
which took me two years of my life.
It was extremely boring work
but it was so boring that I
could listen to lectures online
so I became really smart.
That's [chuckles] the good side of it,
and for "Undone" I had no
idea how we could do that.
We calculated it, after we did a test,
that we would need 120
animators to paint or shade
on the characters frame by frame
and that was just not doable.
So we developed a technique
of using the actual shading
of the live action footage,
get that through a filter,
and then have 22 artists work
on top of that and stylize it
and make it better.
And one part that I
completely underestimated
with "Undone" was the compositing.
I was so used in doing it all myself
because, you know, if you do
all the paintings yourself
and a lot of those things,
then the compositing is not a big deal
because it's already done by me
so it'll all sort of connect more.
With "Undone" we had nine
classically-trained oil painters.
They all were very good painters
but they have different styles,
and there's so many personalities
who add to this puzzle
that the compositing is really the place
where the compositors make sure
that everything looks the same
by using color correction,
adding vignettes, adding
light, things like that,
to bring it all together
and make it look like one cohesive world.
So we work with an edit of live action
and every time that a
shot is being completed
in any kind of stadium,
it will replace the live
action footage in that moment,
so it's like a puzzle that's
growing and growing, growing.
In the end, it's just all
replaced by composited shots.
So the edit is already
locked before we start
so we don't do any editing afterwards.
It's all edited before we start animating.
I think that the rotoscoping
for "Undone" was different
from the rotoscoping that
has been done in the past.
First of all, the basis of
this whole style was really
a classical look.
I'm more influenced by old Disney films
than by modern 3D animation
coming from Hollywood,
and more influenced by Dutch oil paintings
from the 17th century.
And then there's the combination
of that very classical technique
with very modern techniques
like projection mapping.
And I think that the rotoscoping
in that way was different
than what has been done before.
It felt more integrate in an
aesthetically-pleasing look.
One of the scenes that caused
the most problems for me
was a scene where Alma was
in a conversation with Sam.
They had an argument.
She disappears into one memory of her
which was close to the pyramid
where they gather around an old pit.
When I read the story,
I envisioned that while
she was looking at the pit
Sam's huge head would come out of that pit
and suddenly she would
be back into reality.
And the way I saw it it
was very spectacular,
but once it was storyboarded,
it made everybody laugh
which was not the purpose of that shot.
So then, when we animated it...
It's often with projects like this
that solutions are in the details.
So the first time it was
animated it made everyone laugh
because it looked like it was silly.
He came out of the pit and it looked like
instead of sand there was
spaghetti coming from his face
and it didn't make any sense at all.
So it's always in the details, you know.
It's like the way we shaded
it and that sand had to be
beautifully animated with,
in 2D by the way, most of it.
Adding, you know, dust.
Especially when you want
to make things look big.
All the little stuff that's
happening should be small.
If all the pieces that come
from his head, for instance,
are too big, it looks silly.
It looks like it's fake.
So it's always in those kind of details
to make sure that it works.
And finally, it's a beautiful scene.
It's still weird, I mean
still makes some people laugh
but at least it's unsettling
in a good way, I think.
So there's one shot that
we storyboarded in a way
that made it very, very hard to film it
because it was sort of a
sequence of all kind of
unrelated memories of Alma.
In the storyboards, the moment
where those scenes would
sort of change would be the hands.
So we would see the hand of Alma
and suddenly it would be
the hand of small Alma
and we just told that whole visual story
through the editing of hands.
And doing that on a set
is very, very difficult,
and because we storyboarded it so well,
we got away with it.
And then that whole strange
edit of moving cameras
to make sure that everything was matching,
that would have to be animated, too.
And so we had to make a lot of paintings
and sort of seemingly
connect them by 3D animation
and all kinds of tricks.
And I think that's the scene,
and it's a scene in episode
four of which I'm very proud,
especially because the whole trip,
it could be a trip in
Alma's head, we don't know,
but it ends with her
when she sees her mother
arguing with her father
when she was a small child,
and she comes towards the
camera with a bottle of pills
and she said, "You need
to take your pills, Alma."
And suddenly we're in reality again.
And that whole dialogue,
the way we filmed it
felt very emotional to me
because to me it was very clear
that she might be very
confused and schizophrenic.
And I think that's a thing
that you can probably
only do with animation.
[melancholy instrumental music]
I think 10 years ago, no
distributor would think
that this would a be successful.
The whole story is done
in a very risky way
there's a lot of genres.
It's comedy, it's tragedy, it's drama,
it's also science-fiction,
there's some psychological
thriller elements to it.
It's so much, I could have gone so wrong.
What I learned from
working with people is that
I always thought that Hollywood produced
so much formula films
because too many people
are interfering and then
it all becomes like sort of
an uninteresting thing
and it gets dumbed down.
And what I notice with "Undone",
it's especially the opposite,
is that when you're on
a set, you're with a lot
of very good brains and everybody
adds to the whole thing,
and you have much more like brainpower
to actually do the right thing.
And that's a very new experience for me
and I love it because you
can move so much faster.
The other thing that I learned
is that we were working
on a very big time pressure.
We had to do three hours
of high level animation
in one and a half year,
and that time pressure...
Actually, you know when
I'm making my own films
sometimes it takes me months
to come up with ideas.
Now, often I had a visual
effects meeting at one o'clock
and I would make up all
the visual effects at 12.
You know, pressure makes everything fluid.
Your brain start working
much, much faster.
And then there's always
the input of other people
who can make sure that the ideas
are developed even further.
[corn horn honks]
[cars crash]
