| According to Benjamin Franklin, there are only two certainties in this joyride we call life – death and taxes.
Of taxes we can be sure, just ask The Great Satan a.k.a. Revenue Canada.
But death?
What if the Grim Reaper was reduced to an ineffectual, nine-to-five working stiff living in "the Styx" and constantly humiliated by a Beethoven-loving daisy?
As offbeat as it sounds, that’s the premise behind Mr. Reaper’s Really Bad Morning, an animated film created by Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) alumni Kevin Kurytnik and Carol Beecher by their studio, Fifteen Pound Pink Productions.
Ten years in the making, the 17-minute short started as a comic strip in 1989 when George Reaper appeared in ARG!, Kurytnik’s self-published anthology, and was completed as a film in 2004.
From there, the short has competed in film festivals around the world, capturing awards and garnering praise from the likes of Academy Award nominee Bill Plympton and Oscar-winning producer Marcy Page of the National Film Board of Canada.
Kurytnik says the goal was to make a "weird-ass, experimental" short, and, along with Beecher, set out to detail a day in the life of George Reaper, a weary entity trudging through a job no one appreciates.
Patterned after silent film actor Buster Keaton for his stone-faced persona and stillness, the Reaper’s minimal body movement required the animators to rely on expression rather than motion.
"We were trying to go against your standard convention of frantic movement all the time with big, round, happy characters," says Beecher.
"So he was very restrained, and it was more about the subtlety of acting than the freaking out, wacky cartoon stuff. You can change expressions so easily when you’re drawing these little drawings in pencil."
But that’s not to say the Reaper just twiddles his bony thumbs the whole film.
Taking a page from Looney Tunes, the two injected what Kurytnik calls a "Warner Bros. sensibility" into the Reaper’s futile battle with Norman the Daisy.
"Some of the look comes from Warner Bros., and the last part of the film with Reaper and the flower and the conflict between the two, the violence is totally Warner Bros.," says Kurytnik.
"When Reaper’s bazooka goes off wrong and the warranty crumbles to dust, that’s pure Tex Avery."
Beecher and Kurytnik admit to having had a blast making the film, but acknowledge the project came with its share of obstacles.
On a technical level, Reaper started out as a cel animation and ended up being digital. Existing artwork couldn’t be adapted to the digital environment and forced the duo to redo everything.
Despite the setback, Kurytnik decided to take the good from the bad.
"That was a major bitch, but that was life," he says.
"It was a learning project and so we just worked on it as we had time. The thing was we learned to deal with digital production. We learned character animation and we learned the entire digital process all the way to the level of DreamWorks."
Even when sequences were done digitally, world events played a part in the editing process.
A scene involving a mid-air plane collision was scrapped after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Deleting the scene was never a question for Beecher.
"It didn’t feel right at all, not at all after that," she says.
In its place, the animators decided to drop an asteroid on Calgary.
"We like the idea of including our environment," says Kurytnik with a smile.
"I mean, how many times has New York been punished?"
What was also punishing was the funding, as the film cost roughly $250,000, almost 60 per cent coming out of the animators’ pockets with the remainder from grants provided by arts foundations.
"People don’t understand this, but when people make their own films, whether they’re live action or animation, they usually end up in debt for quite some time when things are done," says Kurytnik.
With Reaper finally completed, Kurytnik and Beecher still have their plates full.
The two are taking orders for the special edition of Reaper through their website, www.mrgeorgereaper.com. The DVD, crammed with extras, is also being sold at select comic shops around the city and will be accompanied by a release party at the upcoming Calgary International Film Festival.
In addition, the animators have also been commissioned by the Bravo Network for Intergalactic Who’s Who, a series of comedic one-minute shorts featuring the different creatures of planet Zig 5 for 2007.
For Kurytnik, the Reaper experience afforded him the ability to test and learn, and he is more than happy to share his knowledge with his students at ACAD.
"It’s kind of our reward to other people, so they don’t go through some of the stresses that we went through in terms of just not knowing," he says.
"We want a community here of people doing interesting stuff." |
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