April Fools!

You guessed it, What Puppets Can Do is not a real upcoming Adult Time series, but we had a blast working on the concept. Our goal was to create a stop motion parody of current trends in adult animation using papier-mâché puppets, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!

Although What Puppets Can Do is not an actual series, we would like to provide you with a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the stop motion trailer and the talented studio behind it. Check out our interview below with co-director Renaud Plante from Les Films de l’Ampoule.

Can you tell us more about yourselves and Les Films de l’Ampoule?

Les films de l’ampoule is our production company. We are from Montreal. Matthieu and I have been working together for some years now. We are making stop motion short films, tv work and commercials. I’ve always been a huge fan of stop motion. I had a fiction film background and Matthieu was working at the National Film Board in animation. We met because we had both a film presented at the same festival. We began talking and realized we should work together. Our creative universe was similar. We both liked to mix daily routines and a fantasy approach in our creations.

How did you get involved in making this April Fools’ Day joke?

Eric Falardeau knew our work and approached us a year ago to ask if we would be willing to create for April Fools’ a trailer for a fake stop motion sex show. We were automatically interested. Why wouldn’t we want to work on a stop motion sex show? Where everything is possible. Every absurdity. Every intimate detail. No holds barred by reality. When you do it in animation it gives a distance that is quite amusing. The true question was why a fake show Adult Time? Why not do a real one?

What was behind your idea?

The possibilities are infinite when you work in animation. The question was what would we want to see in a Stop motion sex series? That’s when the idea of pornstar dreaming of things they wish they could see or live came. What would a porn performer would have never seen in their line of work? And what Puppets could do that humans would not. That’s how What Puppets Can Do was born. At the same time, we thought it was fun to have Tommy Pistol and Siri Dahl talking to each other about their sexual visions.

How did you make the Tommy and Siri puppets?

Our puppets are made mainly with paper, foam core, lego parts and glue. We looked at films and pictures of them but the idea was not to do an identical reproduction of Tommy and Siri. We wanted to play with certain aspects of their look and personality and inject it in a puppet. A puppet not totally realistic looking but not totally cartoony either.

What are the stages of making a stop motion scene?

When we have our screenplay, our puppets and our dialogue track. We’re ready to shoot. We sit down and begin thinking about how to improve our storyboard. The actions, the way the characters move. How to give life to those characters with their mimics.  It takes a lot of time to shoot. It takes 24 pictures per second to create the movements of the puppet. So if the film is a minute and 15 seconds. You do the math. It moves slowly but with assurance. We are always very prepared. It gives us time to dive into the creation aspect of it, ad lib things but also to think about other crazy projects we might do. Stop motion filmmaking requires patience from its filmmakers. It’s a bit like going fishing. We are patient, steady and always ready to capture the next incredible thing. That we never saw before.

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us!

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