![]() ![]() We sort of felt like we were trying to move a whole beach, one grain of sand at a time. But there were long stretches of time when Neil and I would just be working on pinatas and we’d be the only two guys who were actually making stuff for the movie. The last six months that we were working on it was when the majority of the work actually materialized. Anyway, when we were working on that - I actually found in my notes on my iPhone from like, over 1,000 days ago, a note about this movie. ![]() I’d always had that idea in mind, even when we were doing the last animated documentary, which is called Vaseline and Pepper, the story of my friend covering his face with vaseline and then adding pepper to give the illusion that he had a beard when he was 12 years old, so that he could get into Amazons, y’know the strip club in Montreal West? That’s another true story. KMH: How long did the process take from the beginning to the end?įM: I think it took something like two and a half years from beginning to end. There are places in the real world that they simulate. We went to all the locations and the miniatures and stuff all adhere to streets that really exist, even though they’re cartoony and the proportions aren’t totally correct. Making sure that Stefan always looks like Stefan, Ralph always looks like Ralph and the kids dressed as the kids would be dressed in the ’70s. We really did try to adhere to the look of the time. We had already done a bunch of animated documentaries prior, so we viewed this as a fantastic opportunity to take things to another level and make things as visually interesting as possible. I guess the documentary form, when you don’t have primary source materials, you have a little bit more leniency to present things visually. We got a bunch of photographs from Stef and Ralph of what they would have looked like around the time, but it was really an opportunity to go wild in terms of animating, filling up crowd scenes and giving it our own interpretation. That was the only thing that we had to go off. It’s a pretty funny picture, just him smiling, shaking this guy’s hand with a plaque in between. It’s a photograph of Ralph accepting an award from the local Canadian Legion in Montreal East and inscribed on the back of it - it doesn’t have a specific date, it just says 1972-1975, it says: Ralph accepting an award for disrupting local gang activity. KMH: Why did you choose to animate this story, instead of using photos etc?įM: There’s only one real piece of primary source material that we have from the actual event. I’d always hear this story about the night they fought a biker gang over and over again. So Stefan was actually at the event that takes place in the movie. Later on, Ralph was one of his high school teachers as well, and my dad’s best friend Stefan was a DJ at dances that Ralph would throw. And he actually remembers consoling himself with the idea that if his parents passed away, Ralph would take care of him. My dad had such admiration for Ralph that prior to going to bed when he was a really young kid, he remembers thinking over - when you’re a kid the most scary feeling in the world is wondering what’s going to happen if your parents pass away. The main character, his name is Ralph, and he was actually my father’s school teacher growing up. ![]() Kayla Marie Hillier: How did you first hear the motorcycle gang story that The Chaperone is based on?įraser Munden: It’s something that I heard many times over growing up. I caught up with co-director Fraser Munden earlier this week to talk about his fantastic film, Thoroughbread and their experience at TIFF. The film, which includes over 11,000 hand-drawn images, hand-crafted props and DIY 3D fx, tells the true story of a teacher chaperoning a school dance in the ‘70s, in Montreal, when a motorcycle gang invades. They also went on to be nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Park City, UT’s Slamdance Film Festival. ![]() Their first non-student film, The Chaperone 3D, part of an animated documentary trilogy, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall and walked away with second place for Best Canadian Short Film. Thoroughbread Pictures has much to celebrate this year. ![]()
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