Interview with Virgil Widrich

Where did the idea for Fast Film come from?
I got the idea for Fast Film while working on Copy Shop. We tore up a lot of paper in the sound studio to create the film’s sound effects. I used the old printouts, some of them rejects from the production, and there were thousands of them. By that evening, the floor was covered with a sea of paper, and it was a copy of the film in its entirety. On some of the wads of paper you could see Johannes Silberschneider walking in various scenes, and then I thought it would be a great idea to make an animation film with three-dimensional paper figures on which other films are playing. Therefore, Fast Film represents the next technological generation after Copy Shop. Copy Shop was a two-dimensional film on paper, Fast Film unfolds in the third dimension.

Compared to Copy Shop what new challenges did Fast Film pose?
In a technical sense, it meant that individual images were taken from various films or printed out, and then these printouts were folded into various figures. The objects were then assembled in various arrangements and a background was added so that four, five and up to 30 different films are visible within a single shot. That was the idea behind Fast Film. The challenge was to combine found footage in a meaningful way. The content and perspective of each image must match, but the individual shots must also fit together and tell the story, and do that extremely quickly. Applied to literature, that would be like taking individual sentences that rhyme from all of Shakespeare’s plays and using them to write a love poem which tells its own story. In that sense Fast Film is a journey through film history and at the same time a new film which is created in the heads of the audience members. In my opinion the fun thing about Fast Film is that everyone sees his or her own personal memories. Everybody has certain stimuli which trigger specific reactions, or recognizes certain actors or directors immediately. Suddenly the viewer is watching not Fast Film but his or her memory of the film from which the image was taken. I think that, when watching it, the audience switches back and forth in their heads between their perception of Fast Film and their perception of the films it references, so that everyone sees a completely different film.

How would you sum up the story?
The story is a classic three-acter. The hero wants the woman, who is kidnapped by the bad guys; the hero has to save the woman, and he is taken prisoner himself and to the enemy’s headquarters; he escapes with the woman, and in a big finale they win out over all the bad guys, are saved and it all ends in a big kiss. All James Bond films and almost all action movies work in the same way, that’s why I adopted this structure. It’s necessary to work with standardized patterns or I wouldn’t have been able to tell a story with components taken from a variety of films. It works quite well, depicting time and space with the technology I used for Fast Film, but it would have been almost impossible to make a psychological drama because identification with a particular actor is important. But because the actors changed constantly in Fast Film, the figures of hero and heroine needed to create this identification. Like in Copy Shop identity is a central theme in Fast Film because although there was a lightning-fast switch of actors, the stories were all the same, which is basically the norm in cinema anyway.

A number of different genres can be identified inFast Film.
Of course I tried to structure the film in a number of different worlds. In the end there’s the musical world, in the middle the action film, and then there are a number of different love stories. It was interesting to notice that scenes from action movies which actually show action don’t offer a lot of potential, because they’re edited to move so fast. At first I wanted to use material from action movies only, but in many cases there was no way to shorten the shots even more and use that footage to do something for Fast Film.

Why was the folding technique necessary for creating the desired effects?
Fast Film’s esthetic style is based on a certain amount of imprecision, in other words it’s far removed from a clean computer-animation film; it has paper airplanes and trains that are hand-animated, and each figure looks a little different because it wasn’t possible to fold them all identically, which produced this jittery movement. Similarly to Copy Shop a vital part of this film is the esthetic of imperfection and roughness and impreciseness, which I like a lot. Computers could have been used to make it clean and smooth, but that would have been a different objective. The members of my team then folded all these figures, and strict order had to be maintained, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to find anything again. In total we folded about 65,000 paper figures. We also hired a Japanese origami artist to help us. It takes six hours to fold a horse, and that’s why it makes just a brief appearance in the film, otherwise we would have needed another five years. Space is by the way another interesting theme in Fast Film, because everything is after all flat. We shot the train from the side and head-on, and both are flat, but a 3D train is created in the viewer’s head.

The shots in Fast Film comprise an astounding number of layers.
A fascinating thing about Fast Film is that, when you see it on the big screen, it’s edited by what the viewer looks at. That is the determining aspect: When you watch three TVs tuned to different channels simultaneously, there are four different films, the space containing the television and each of the three on the TVs. Depending on the object of my focus, a new film is created on the basis of these four elements. And Fast Film works in a similar way. Say I have a train with eight cars, and a different film is being shown in each one, I can look at the train as a whole or at each car separately, I can watch Tarzan or a western, and when two people talk afterwards, each one would have something different to say. The one was watching Tarzan, and the other just the hero in the western. And in my opinion that’s what makes it so enjoyable, that this subjective perception turns everybody into their own personal film editor.

What individual work steps were involved?
First there was a screenplay in text form, and that was followed by a found-footage film in which old footage was recombined in the conventional way. I made that just to see what would happen when I put together a car chase with footage from black-and-white films, color films and science-fiction movies, spaceships, trains and cars. The second step was extremely concrete, finding footage with in- and out-points that fit together. Combining the background, foreground and object resulted in a kind of draft film which I made on a computer, with squares representing the trains and triangles standing for airplanes. That was the basic form of the end product, which we then printed out from the original, animated and put together. It was an extremely long process, and each shot was in production for weeks or months. The longest shot was 21 seconds, but most were only three. It really is a fast film. All in all we worked on it for two and a half years, day after day, day and night.

Who was in the team which worked on the film?
A team of twelve animators spent an entire year working on it. They acquired all kinds of specialized knowledge and split up into work groups, because the production process comprised a number of different parts. It all began with the selection of footage, definition of the clips and the figures, and the question of what the figures such as the evil paper airplanes and good airplanes look like, what does the train look like from the front, what does it look like from the side. Many of the team members were able to do everything, some were better with physical animation, and others are very good with computers, with preparing the material and footage or in post-production. It eventually became obvious where the strengths and passions were. For example Carmen Völker spent a lot of time working with the paper, what kinds of tears develop where in the film, and she created a new world with a constant presence in the film.

What was the source of the footage?
I spent half a year preparing the film’s content and figuring out how the chase scene would work, looking at film material from throughout the history of film, and also waiting for the film to tell me what it wanted. Then I spent a year with the initial crew, just doing research; we looked through about 2000 films and set up a huge database. We looked at hundreds, thousands of videos that had been sorted according to shot, such as where is there a tracking shot toward a surprised face, where is there someone exiting a doorway, where is there someone reaching for a gun in close-up, where are there kisses shot in profile in the rain? That had to be put together, entered into the database and stored digitally so we could access it at any time. Then whenever I thought, I need a close-up of a pistol, I knew right away where I could find one, in which films, in color, black and white, and so on.

The sound is an important and interesting element, isn’t it?
Frédéric Fichefet, who created the sound for Fast Film, works in a way similar to how we work with images. The sound is created with samples, he takes worlds of sound from various works and constructs a new one on that basis. Here too we collected sounds from thousands of films and sorted them according to category - trains squealing as they start up, trains that don’t squeal as they start up, and other things like that. The sound comprises hundreds of tracks, and together, they make up Fast Film’s sound as a whole. Of course this conveys a lot of emotion and triggers a lot of memories. There are certain sounds which can be heard again and again, because even the big films use the same sound libraries. The sound is extremely important, because it creates a bridge between the various films. A continuous narrative sound makes a film much easier to understand, and Fast Film would be extremely difficult to understand without sound. With sound it’s a completely different story.