As the Ryerson’s first completely online film festival is underway, CJRU reporter Sophia de Guzman speaks with Benjamin Fieschi-Rose about his thesis film, The Lost Seahorse. Fieschi-Rose discusses the adapting, difficulties and inspiration that came about while making a thesis film during COVID-19.
CJRU: So, tell us about The Lost Seahorse, or as much as you can tell me without spoiling it.
FIESCHI-ROSE: Yeah, absolutely. So, the Lost Horse is an ecologically themed stop motion short set in the Indo-Pacific Ocean, and it follows a white seahorse who struggles to survive and blend in with this colourful coral reef. And essentially, the film starts when a yacht anchors itself above his reef and sends him far away from his home. The film follows his journey back home as he encounters a variety of different sea creatures and learns new ways to adapt to different environments from them.
CJRU: When did you guys start making this movie and how did this idea come to be?
FIESCHI-ROSE: My producer, Kirsten and I, had always planned on making our thesis film together, and we had a very different idea in mind before the pandemic hit. But when that came about, it left a lot of us in a position where we didn’t know what the future held and what kind of films that we were going to make. So, we started rethinking how we wanted to approach our thesis because we wanted to tell that film in a very specific way that wasn’t really fit for the uncertainty of the pandemic.
I’d made a stop motion film back in my second year at Ryerson about microplastics in the ocean. It was an experimental animation piece about pollution and ecological peace. So that was always in the back of my mind and we were looking for an interesting story to tell during the pandemic. Kirsten and I also have a background in creature effects, puppetry and animation, so the idea to do a stop motion film came about from there. You know, I’m a huge animation fan so, the prospect of doing that for my thesis was very exciting.
CJRU: So, how long did it take you guys to make The Last Seahorse?
FIESCHI-ROSE: It’s funny that you ask, where we’re actually still finishing it up. I believe today* will be the last day that we’re actively making changes on the film, but it’s been over a year. We started writing last June, the process of making an animated film is a little bit different than how you would approach live action filmmaking. We had to get started very, very early on because there’s so much planning involved to go about shooting something like this. It’s been over 12 months now that we’ve been actively working on it.
CJRU: When you decided to do this, what inspirations did you have while you were making this movie?
FIESCHI-ROSE: Mm, I grew up in Vancouver, by the ocean and the natural world and especially coral reefs are something that have really fascinated me for my whole life and it’s been a big passion of mine. In addition to that, doing animation and films with puppetry and creatures has been an ongoing passion of mine since I was a little kid. So this was sort of a perfect blend of those two things.
But in terms of how the idea came up, there wasn’t really a crazy story behind how we got to it. It was really just taking the time and running through a bunch of different scripts, surrounding themes that spoke to us. This struck us as a really important film to be making right now, with people in lockdown, everyone’s been maybe more receptive to sort of the ecological issues going on in the world. We also thought it was a timely piece to make because it’s also a story about identity and feeling isolated and alienated from your world.
CJRU: And how was that, working during the pandemic?
FIESCHI-ROSE: Yeah, it was interesting. It’s the largest sort of animated film that I’ve ever done so I can’t really compare it to something of the same scale outside of the pandemic. In some ways, it was really difficult, especially during the second wave when things were really locked down, just because we had to be together. Everything in a stop motion film is built from scratch. So, when you have all these people working remotely, your production designer and your art director building sets, myself and the rest of the puppet team making the characters and our cinematographer preparing all of the motion control equipment for the underwater film, it’s hard to make sure that when you bring those things together, that everyone’s been working towards the same goal. Same color palette, same everything. So, there were a lot of challenges with that and just with keeping everything together, it’s a film that probably would have had a much bigger team on it if it weren’t for COVID. At the same time, it’s been really liberating because now, there’s not a whole lot of difference between us having a crew member in Toronto and having one across the world. So we actually have a team that’s kind of spread out. Our composer is working out of Barcelona, our post-production supervisors in L.A. and we have visual effects artists all over the world. So in that sense, the fact that we’re all at home has just kind of meant that we can bring on whoever we want on this project. We have recent graduates, students and other emerging artists from all over the world involved in the project. So that’s been a really neat thing that might not have happened if we weren’t in a pandemic.
CJRU: Yeah, I can imagine. So while working, how many people did you have in the studio?
FIESCHI-ROSE: For the most part, we would never really have more than three or four people in there at once. We also have a lot of different locations in the film because it’s an adventure story, so there were times when we would have our art department loading in a set, and because we’re doing animation, our production designer, our director and I could clear the rest of the space so they could build a set. Then we could bring in our cinematographer who could light and set up the camera, and then our animator could come in and work on the shot. So that was kind of the beauty of it even though, maybe, we had six or seven people who were ever in the space, we could still work. Even in the worst times of the second wave, we were able to continue to make our film.
CJRU: And where was your studio located?
FIESCHI-ROSE: We threw around a number of options, but ultimately we ended up building it at our animation director’s house. He was the one who had to actively be working with the set the most, so it made the most sense for us to go to him.We needed a space with very little light as well, because what ends up being a 10 second shot might take you a day to do and the sun will rise and set during that time. His family was very generous about giving their basement for seven months.
CJRU: I’m sure you must be excited to go to the festival and see your peers’ films!
FIESCHI-ROSE: Yeah! It’s been interesting because, the way that the program is structured, if you’re a director or a producer, you’ll have your main project and then do smaller roles on other films. For myself, all of my smaller roles this year were on this film. So I feel like I’ve kind of been working in a bubble and not really been exposed to what everyone else has been working on. I’m excited to see what everyone else has been doing this year, because we were sort of our own little crew doing our own thing.
We’ve got lots of films to see, not to mention the fact that a lot of last year’s films that never got a chance to screen, are going to be playing at the festival, too.
The Lost Seahorse premiered at the 2021 edition of the Ryerson University Film Festival. It went on to win the Best Achievement in Visual Effects at the festival.
