Let’s be the 47th point of sale to say it: nothing else on TV or broadcast is alike Undone. The Amazon Prime sci-fi animated series centers on a woman named Alma (played by Rosa Salazar of Alita fame) who suffers an accident that changes his relationship with the world. And as Alma grapples with that 180 progress, she tries to investigate her father’s mysterious death (played by Bob Odenkirk, Better call Saul) The story … well, it’s better to say less and avoid spoilers for any viewers to come.
Undone However, the style deserves all the words that one can dedicate. If you’ve heard of the show before, it’s likely because it represents the first major broadcast series to be performed entirely on a rotoscope, an animation technique in which artists paint over live actors using a variety of methods and styles. (Maybe you’ve seen the campus filming documentary Tower or Richard Linkliter’s Wake up Lifetime; that’s a rotoscope in action.) Rotoscopic work can be dreamy, museum, nightmare, disjointed or otherworldly, sometimes all at once. In other words, it could be the perfect creative visual choice for a show like Undone.
The credit for executing this vision goes to a trio of behind-the-scenes production companies: Tornante in Southern California, Submarine Productions in Amsterdam, and Minnow Mountain in Austin, Texas. If that kind of global collaboration still doesn’t say it, we will: the process was Complicated. But you don’t have to take it from us, since Undone director and production designer Hisko Hulsing sat down nicely for our latest entertainment episode of “War Stories” and described the painstaking process that makes the show It looks so effortlessly beautiful to all of us looking at home.
Worth more than thousand words
Rotoscopy at this scale turns out to be a double challenge. First, it has to make sense from a narrative perspective, which means that the final images fit the narrative and things don’t get too close to the mysterious valley and remove viewers from the story. Hulsing said Undone It initially flew too close to the mysterious valley (that gray area where things look almost realistic but different enough to be jarring), but the team increased their impressionistic instincts and elevated the artificial nature of show business. Making those adjustments finally played into Undone history, too, strengthening the decision to follow this highly stylized approach.
“First of all, we use the rotoscope because it is a more realistic approach to animation,” Hulsing told Ars. “Second, it remains ambiguous in the story whether Alma is schizophrenic or experiencing some kind of nightmare or flashback. To me, it seemed like if we were to use a rotoscope it would create a very unreal atmosphere as long as it seemed realistic. So for the audience, it’s not always clear when you’re experiencing something completely unreal … I think the rotoscope helps with that. Even realistic scenes can seem a little suspicious. “
Eating the elephant one bite at a time
The second major challenge with rotoscopy is the entire technique required to execute eight episodes. Doing Undone It involved everything from directing actors on a sound stage to projection mapping and outdated oil painting. And each step of the process probably reached a more granular level in Undone than you would in another project. Take the filming of the sound stage, for example.
“A lot of people think we just filmed live action and tracked it down, but that’s not how we worked,” said Hulsing. “We filmed actors on a soundstage in Los Angeles, but there is no real set. There are only a few grids that help us determine the perspective for our virtual sets. So, before filming an episode, we designed each setting that will appear, each room , house, exterior, we designed it. We make floor plans with measurements. So on set, my assistant Nora uses duct tape to show the actors where the walls are so they don’t cross them while acting. “
In the end, the show took a whole year to produce (with more than 50,000 hours of character animation and more than 130,000 hand-drawn frames, according to Deadline). But every time the production team ran into trouble executing some ambitious idea or scene, they found solutions by getting small. “When you want things to look big, all the little details have to be small,” as Hulsing said. You can hear the lifelong entertainer provide step-by-step details in the previous full episode, but the results speak for themselves. Amazon renewed the series for a second season with two months to its debut, and some critics even believe the show deserves a 2020 Emmy nomination for Best Drama.
“Ten years ago, no distributor would think that this could be successful. The whole story is done in a very risky way. It is a myriad of genres: it’s comedy, tragedy, drama, science fiction, and there are some suspenseful psychological elements.” . “There is so much, it could have gone so wrong,” said Hulsing. “I always thought that Hollywood produced so many formula films because too many people interfere and then they are speechless. And what I notice with Undone, it’s the opposite. When you’re on this set, you have a lot of very good brains and they all add up to everything. You have a lot more brainpower to do the right thing. “
