Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby's latest short film, Wild Life, first showed at the 2011 Worldwide Short Film Festival, and won the Canadian Film Institute's award for best Canadian animation at this year's Ottawa International Animation Festival.
In Part #1 of this exclusive interview, Amanda and Wendy shared how the film came together. Here they discuss the pitfalls of making the film and share each other's strengths and weaknesses.
S101: Did you ever feel a point where you were going off-track with this film, and how did you get yourself back on?
Wendy Tilby: “Did somebody tell you?” (laughs)
Amanda Forbis: “Don’t look at me! (everyone laughs) It took several years to make and, during that time, we worked on a lot of commercial jobs. We’d recover from that, get more done, do something else, look back at it and wonder, ‘What were we doing again?’ It was necessary, but detrimental as well. It’s easy to get tunnel vision . . .”
S101: How did you get back on?
Wendy: “Rammed our head against it until it gave way. (laughs) All our colleagues are not in Calgary, our producers were in Montreal and Edmonton so we saw them occasionally. We were isolated, so whenever we had some fresh eyes on it, we’d respond to that.”
Amanda: “We confer a lot. One of us might be objecting to something all the time. Wendy loves editing so she’d tinker with the edit and that gives a fresh perspective. This film didn’t veer off-track in terms of concept, it was to tell one significant moment in this guy’s life to get us through the narrative.”
Wendy: “We debated about whether we wanted to keep the comet. One of our producers wanted us to take out the comet information, we did polls and we found it was almost a 50/50 split. People who liked it really liked it, thought it had a scientific texture that worked against this poetic quality. Other people thought it was distracting. Ultimately we left it but we almost took it out.”
S101: It felt right to you.
Wendy: “Even if you’re not absorbing the information at first, we hoped that on subsequent viewings it would make the short better.”
S101: How did you get together and how do you share the workload?
Amanda: “We met at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 1985. Wendy went to Montreal to make her film Strings with the National Film Board, and I stayed in Vancouver. When Wendy started When the Day Breaks, she asked me if I wanted to work on it with her. I moved to Montreal and made that together.
“The critical factor is that we have a sympathetic aesthetic. Through getting to know one another, we learn our failings and our strengths; we fill in for one person’s failings and back off when they’re demonstrating their strengths. It’s a pretty intense relationship, and can often be frustrating, but mostly it works really well.”
Wendy: “We both do everything; there’s not a clear definition of labour. Amanda painted a lot more than I did-”
Amanda: “Wendy edited a lot more than I did.”
Wendy: “But there’s nothing in this film that hasn’t been collaborated on.”
S101: Amanda, why don’t you discuss Wendy’s strengths and weaknesses, and Wendy, why don’t you discuss Amanda’s strengths and weaknesses?
Amanda: “You know: we still have to have a relationship after we stop talking to you! (everyone laughs) Wendy’s strength is that she’s down to her bones a filmmaker, she always has been. She’s a great editor, a great global thinker, very attentive to sound, she’s actually fairly bright –“
Wendy: “Fairly bright?” (everyone laughs)
Amanda: “All fine things. Her weaknesses are that she is never satisfied. That can wreak havoc but that can be the most important thing. (turns to Wendy) How’s that?”
Wendy: “That’s a lot on the positive side! (everyone laughs) Amanda’s brilliant, she’s good at everything she does, she draws better, she paints better-”
Amanda: “Just so you know, I am rolling my eyes!”
Wendy: “She has a gift with storytelling, humour, characterization, she’s an actress so she’s brilliant at directing actors.”
Amanda: “My one downfall is that I’m quite lazy; I have to be dragged sometimes. (to Wendy) You didn’t hear that!”
Wendy: “I'm a perfectionist and I have workaholic tendencies-”
Amanda: “And I have recreationaholic tendencies!” (everyone laughs)
Wendy: “I'm obsessive about things and she keeps things balanced.”
S101: What would you like audiences to take away from Wild Life? Something you see but audiences might not?
Amanda: “To say ‘ambiance’ is kinda lame but that’s part of what I want audiences to take away: a sense of landscape, a small tragedy, a realization of everyone’s vulnerability. Growing up in Calgary, I was in one of the most uncelebrated parts of the Earth and I think a lot of Canadians feel that way. And that's before it turned into a big, fat oil town that everyone hated! (laughs)
“I adore Alberta’s environment but I hate it too because it’s kinda scary: the severity of the landscape, it’s beautiful and frightening. It’s a very powerful place.”
Wendy: “I want Wild Life to be more than the sum of its parts, to work on an emotional level and not just be a collection of pretty pictures. It might take subsequent viewings for some things to resonate, but I hope they will. The good thing about animation is that it is meant to be viewed several times and we hope Wild Life will get better with subsequent viewings.”
Amanda: “I have a hard time encapsulating it, and that’s not a bad thing. When you make a film, you visually create something you have a hard time encapsulating. And once you send it out, you hope people will understand what you’re trying to say.”
Dominic von Riedemann - Dominic is the Animated Film Feature Writer, and winner of 11 Suite 101 Editors' Choice Awards.
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