"...things had gotten out of control... while I continued to withdraw in the safety of my snail fortress."
Throughout Memoir of a Snail, the protagonist Grace hoards and shoplifts snail paraphernalia to deal with a series of traumas and unfortunate situations. The collecting starts casually but soon it spirals out of control, trapping Grace into a cage of self-pity.
At the height of Grace's hoarding, the shelves bear the weight of snail merchandise, struggling to stay up; the walls suffocate, smothered by posters and shell spirals; and floors disappear under piles of snail-branded chocolate, pasta and caviar she will never consume, snail-themed shoes Grace will never wear, and unopened snail-shaped soap and condoms.
During this production we were mostly concerned about not having enough snail props and set dressing to visually explore Grace's hoarding disorder and viscerally effect viewers. To make audiences feel overwhelmed and imprisoned as much as Grace. Without a substantial supply of snail objects, we would fail to tell this story.
The film would just not work.
However, the hoard doesn't stop at her bedroom door. It spills out into the hallway, continues into the kitchen and throughout the loungeroom. There's hundreds of hoard items in our titles sequence, and more clinging to a circular wall Grace imagines spinning around her shortly after the climax of the film.
How did we deal with this chaos as producers?
How did we balance the demands of the story with that of the schedule and the limitations of our crew?
THE BALANCING ACT
There was only one request Adam asked for when it came to the schedule:
To shoot Grace's Canberra bedroom chronologically.
So it shall be done.
For roughly half the shoot (16-17 weeks) this set would remain on a single stage, an inventory of hoard items laid out on a nearby table in categorised tinfoil trays.
Considering we open the film at a later point in Grace's life, it is 'chronological' in the sense that we start from the moment Grace moves in with her foster parents as a child. This provided Adam the opportunity to think linearly, know exactly which pivotal sequences were coming up and to plan for them. This also helped in not revealing too much of the hoard so early on, while also choreographically moving important props like the snail jar, her father's ashes, the Bolex camera and the photo frame of Grace and Gilbert around the room to cater to specific sequences/shots, also taking account of what we may see on the reverse wall later on. These items were adjusted with the ebb and flow of the gradually increasing snail hoard while still keeping continuity in mind.
Fortunately for us, Grace's Canberra bedroom begins as a blank canvas, save for a few items she brings with her from Melbourne. From the start, we were able to build the world around each stage of Grace's life. Layer by layer, sequence by sequence, we went on a journey with Grace, guided by her narration and internal thoughts. The room became a character all on its own, expanding and shrinking, going through a complete transformative cycle much like Grace herself.
As the bedroom doesn't start to develop a bit of a personality until Grace is a teenager, there was around three to four weeks where we could shoot the sequences in the kitchen, utilising what snail set dressing and hoard items were made or available. Due to a relatively tight framing on Grace and Ken at the dining table, we didn't need to overdo the set dressing behind them (you can see this in the BTS pic below featuring animator Seamus Splisbury), and still had enough hoard set dressing set aside in the instance we might need them earlier than expected over on the other stage for the bedroom.
Reflecting on the below picture now, however... if we had scheduled the kitchen sequences until after completing the bedroom sequences -- which is what happened with the loungeroom (you can see how the loungeroom is more in line with the bedroom peak set dressing further below in this post) -- the walls may have been covered up completely and the kitchen bench overflowing with many more snail mementos. However, as the kitchen doesn't appear as often (around 40 shots) as the bedroom (minimum 145 shots) or loungeroom (minimum 85 shots) in the film, and with only one state of hoard, it's a compromise we made in order to maximise the volume of the hoard available for the most crucial moments of the shoot.
Especially if we weren't able to produce enough items in the first place with our crew size.
The spinning hoard and titles sequence were left for last.
The spinning hoard was part of a complex VFX sequence featuring multiple foreground and background plates transitioning around a stationary Grace. It was also an emotional moment of the film so we wanted to approach each element right, beginning with Grace's expressive animation to Pinky's voiceover. A combination of the animatic, pre- and post-viz was used to time all plates and elements with Grace's performance, such as the spinning wall with disappearing hoard (takes shot in reverse).
For quite some time the titles sequence was going to be achieved using large scale props, standing tall on one or two stages, as if we ourselves could walk through that junkyard of physical objects. With time ticking and crew resources dwindling, that was something we knew we couldn't do -- and may not be as visually impressive. Early on, however, we realised how small of a detail the digital cameras could register, e.g. a small wavy hair on a close up of tiny child silicone hands. And with that, our regular-sized set pieces and props could do exactly what Adam wanted to do: emulate the opening titles sequence from Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991) on a small scale.
Adam just shared about this set and sequence over on Instagram today.
In the end, we achieved what we set out to accomplish: Make a film about a hoarder.
However, this was not without taking a few shortcuts or cheats along the way...
All crew, including the camera department and even visitors to the studio, were asked to make a snail item to add to the hoard collection. It could be whatever they wanted to make, but Adam would always have final approval -- and if it wasn't good he'd still use them, hidden in the dark recesses of a room or beneath a pile of prettier objects. I even sculpted and painted a couple of items myself.
One artist came up with an ingenious idea to glue a bunch of items, cans or boxes to scrunched up black paper, creating mounds that would assist set dressing and introduce levels to any shot without wasting items in places that would never be seen, cheating the quantity of hoard items. You can see these mounds in the shots above and below. We would also go on to use these mounds to hide the legs of puppets and cheating walks (an example in the film is when Ken returns to the loungeroom carrying the box delivery).
We also made hundreds of little painted swirls, filling empty wall space and glued to every door and window frame, every shelf, to really emphasise the severity of Grace's hoarding. Picture frames also helped in very much the same way, with pages of Adam's artwork and designs to use.
As mentioned earlier, Grace kept some belongings from Melbourne with her. These eventually were swallowed up and lost in the hoard, like the snail jar or porcelain snails, and therefore prop clashes were likely to occur. With the considerable amount of exteriors and interiors in Canberra, Melbourne and Perth, clustered in the schedule out of necessity, how were we able to keep the production moving along? How could we hit our shot targets? How did we keep crew working?
Well, we had some help from a couple of human-sized plasticine hands...
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Images from Instagram @adam_elliot_clay and trailers.
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