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You never know where a ScreenWest Professional Attachment will take you….
Being sent into chemists to buy the entire stock of personal lubricant, and then squeezing it out to form an ocean with waves was just another day at work on the set of Mary and Max for WA animator Pierce Davison.
In late 2007, Pierce was invited by Mary and Max producer Melanie Coombs to help out on the film. To enable him to take up this career boosting opportunity, Pierce applied for and was successful in securing funding from ScreenWest through the Professional Attachment and Mentorship program.
"The director attachment funding meant I could afford to travel and live in Melbourne," Pierce said.
The six week attachment led to writer/director Adam Elliot doing all he could to get Pierce to stay, resulting in Pierce spending a further eight months in Melbourne working as an animation assistant on the feature.
"I was one of the last to leave the studio, which was brilliant. It was great to hang out with Adam and see his processes. To be involved with an animation feature is very rare.... there's only a few going, if ever, in the world."
Mary and Max is only the second stop motion animation feature film made in Australia. With no computer animation used, every detail of the production design needed to be hand made. This included 212 puppets; 133 separate sets including a chocolate heaven and a New York skyline set that took a crew of twenty people two months to complete; 475 miniature props including hand blown wine glasses and a fully functioning typewriter; and even 394 individual ladybird-sized eye pupils, hand punched and each with a white sparkly dot painted on them.
Pierce said the animators openly shared their work techniques. "Everyone was very keen on showing you, they were really kind about skill sharing," he said.
"I learnt a lot of little tricks about how to make things look good, about metal work to help with character movement, about how to improve the quality of my own sets. It's boosted my expectations of my own work."
The production crew also include ex-pat West Australians Craig Fison, art director; Shaun Patton, set construction manager; and Stephen Carroll, runner and also cameraman and editor of the hilarious making of webisodes.
Mary and Max opens nationally April 9.
To view the work of Pierce Davison visit the Davison Brothers website.
