Larkin was a Canadian animator who had worked at the National Film Board of Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, producing several celebrated works. Best known for his film Walking composed of animated vignettes of people walking, Larkin was considered one of the best animators of his generation. In 1969, the Montreal Gazette referred to him as the "Frank Zappa or George Harrison of animation". In the 1970s, unable to cope with his success and the pressure to develop more works, and facing a creative block, he became addicted to alcohol and cocaine. By 1978, he was broke and no longer working for the NFB. He worked as a commercial animator and painter for the next ten years, but by the late 1980s he was living in the streets of Montreal. He continued to draw and sculpt.
Chris Robinson first learned of Larkin in 2000 after his name was mentioned in a discussion by staff member Lesya Fesiak, who had heard about Larkin panhandling in Montreal from a friend. Fesiak and Robinson, who is the director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, drove to Montreal to meet Larkin in June 2000, where they found him panhandling near Schwartz's on Saint Laurent Boulevard. At the time, he resided at the Old Brewery Mission and spent his days "wandering around town" visiting art galleries, museums, and libraries. He always had a notepad with him for drawing. They offered him dinner at a nearby bar, where he recounted his life story, which Robinson found "comical and heartbreaking, pathetic and inspiring". Before leaving, Robinson invited Larkin to Ottawa to watch a few entries for that year's film festival.
Landreth met Larkin at the suggestion of Robinson. Landreth had been taking part in the festival's selection committee when a fourth member of the committee dropped out. Robinson asked Larkin to take the missing committee member's place, and personally drove him to Ottawa in July 2000. Committee members Landreth, Pjotr Sapegin, and Andrei Svislotksi, in addition to Larkin, reviewed the commissioned films competition entries. Nobody on the selection committee knew of Larkin's identity at the time, and Landreth found his presence on the committee to be odd. Committee members were only told about Larkin's identity at the end of the viewings, when they screened each other's films. Larkin was last, showing Walking, Street Musique, and Syrinx. Landreth later described his surprise, and stated "I looked at him and wondered, how did this happen?"
Landreth, at the time employed by Alias, was "immediately inspired" to create a film based on Larkin's life, but waited a few months before acting on it. He met Larkin again in September during the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and asked him if he would agree to be the subject of a film. Larkin agreed, and on 13 February 2001, Landreth decided to make the film.
Developement
Landreth spent several years developing the film. Instead of first creating a storyboard on which the animation would be based, he conceived the theme after interviews with Larkin. After the screenplay was developed, the production followed a more typical process of creating a storyboard, character modelling, scene design, animation, and post-production.
In February 2001, Landreth contacted producer Steven Hoban at Copper Heart Entertainment. Hoban liked the concept for the film, and wanted to include it as a 3D rendering in the IMAX film CyberWorld he was producing. A manager rejected the idea, as the subject material was deemed to be inappropriate for CyberWorld's young target audience.
A production team was assembled with Copper Heart Entertainment, and it received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. The National Film Board of Canada agreed to be a co-producer. Landreth also secured studio space at the Animation Arts Centre of Seneca College in Toronto, and in 2003 four graduates and fifteen undergraduates from its 3D Animation program were recruited to work on the film. The core development team consisted of one computer graphics supervisor, four animators, one texture mapper, one renderer, two set modellers, and a few character modellers.
In the summer of 2001, he conducted several interviews with Larkin, who gave Landreth carte blanche for the project. Landreth accumulated about 20 hours of audio footage, but did not think it was sufficient material on which to base a story, so in August he interviewed him again, this time asking about his alcoholism. Larkin, who had been drinking throughout the interview, responded angrily, and this would become the "climactic moment in the film". This led Landreth to change the production from a story primarily narrated by Larkin to an interview-style cinéma vérité documentary in which Landreth's character had a larger role.
Landreth acquired a comprehensive set of Larkin's works from the National Film Board of Canada and other reference material. He also conducted interviews with Felicity Fanjoy, who had been Larkin's girlfriend in the past, and Derek Lamb, who directed films at the NFB and was a producer for Larkin in the 1970s. He used the interviews and reference material to create a script, which he completed by December.
The animation used the technique of psychological realism, blending dialogue from interviews with subjective screen characters who are "sometimes fragmented, distorted, or in some way unusual". The representation of the characters was partly inspired by Body Worlds, a travelling exhibition of human bodies preserved by plastination to reveal internal anatomical structures.
Landreth has stated that Larkin's character in the film is a subjective interpretation based on his own ideology and experiences, citing one of his favourite quotations "we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are". He animated Larkin as a beaten character "battered by years of substance abuse and still bearing the scars of his artistic failure". Landreth stated that the visual appearance of the characters "reflect pain, insanity, fear, mercy, shame, and creativity", and that the effect was to show the characters' "souls or mental states or psyches".
Landreth incorporated Larkin's alcoholism as part of the narrative of the film, at first in the background as Larkin sips from a thermos, and later directly as Landreth asks Larkin about his alcoholism. The attention to Larkin's alcoholism also reflects Landreth's mother's troubles with alcohol.
Pre-production and production took about 18 months. Use of the Seneca College computing infrastructure, which was loaned for free for the production, was valued by NFB producer Marcy Page at about C$250,000. Intel donated the use of a render farm for the production. The overall cost to produce Ryan was about C$900,000.
The film was dedicated to Landreth's mother, Barbara.
Animation
The animation consists of three-dimensional avatars representing the interview subjects, each "mutilated and deformed in ways expressive of emotional and artistic trauma". The film uses emotional realism instead of photorealism, using graphic elements to represent the characters' state of mind. There is a shift between techniques throughout the animation, particularly the use of hand-drawn vectors, rotoscoping, and 3D rendering of characters and the environments in which they are set. The setting is a dilapidated cafeteria in which the characters representing Larkin and Landreth are seated across from each other at a table. It was chosen to bring the characters into one setting for interaction, instead of having to deal with multiple settings. It also provides a neutral setting with a relaxed atmosphere to mitigate any initial bias toward the characters. In some scenes, colour correction was used to "achieve a dark mood".
Incorporated into the film in their entirety are two of Larkin's most famous animated shorts, Walking and the 1972 line animation Street Musique. As Larkin's character dances with one of the characters from Street Musique, stroboscoping arms are shown, an homage to Pas de deux by Norman McLaren, Larkin's mentor at the NFB. An animated rendering of Larkin attending the 42nd Academy Awards in 1970 is also included.
Animators were required to present a "continuously varying viewpoint" using distortion effects on a linear perspective camera. Each object in the three-dimensional scene had to be independently specified, and frame composition had to be independent of the projection. Three types of projection systems were used for the production of Ryan: perspective linear projection for lines converging at a common vanishing point, parallel linear projection for objects to maintain "parallel line relationships", and nonlinear projection for curvilinear distortion of nearby objects. The latter was defined by the viewing and projection transformations of the cameras and spatial weight functions applied to each camera. Included in the model was support for independent manipulation of two-dimensional transformations, particularly for changing an object's translation, rotation, and scaling. The model was then incorporated into Maya for animation using scene geometry deformation. This would render "multiple simultaneous projections and camera angles" to a single frame. The nonlinear projections were also used to establish a "cinematic mood" for the setting.
Overall, Ryan is a tremendous film of beauty, ingenuity and of course entertainment. Utilizing surreal and gorgeous CG, Ryan is the unique marriage of documentary and animation, a pairing that is becoming more common in its wake.
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