- Animation's really a way to transpose your audience into somebody's inner experience, and that's why we feel so connected to Alma because we are actually with her on this strange visual trip. We're not sure what's really happening, just as Alma is not sure. [pensive instrumental music] Hello, I'm Hisko Hulsing. I'm the director and production designer of "Undone". And this is how we brought together classic oil painting techniques with modern techniques like projection mapping in order to create the dreamy, painterly world of "Undone". [pensive instrumental music] "Undone" is about a 27 year old woman called Alma who wakes up from a coma after a car accident completely confused. She's being thrown through different times from her life, through different places, through all kind of weird, dreamlike states, and at the same time she's being visited by her father who had been dead for 18 years. He says that he came back to train her to manipulate time in such a way that she can travel back in time and prevent him from getting murdered. So he gives her like the choice like, "Do you want this boring life that you always had, "or do you want to go "into this spiritual adventure with me?" And at the same time, her family, her sister and her mother, are very concerned. They think that she might be psychotic or schizophrenic.

- You need to come with me to this clinic.

- Nope. [keys cling] I'm going to Mexico.

- I first use rotoscoping when I finished a film called "Seventeen", which I drew completely by hand, I animated it by hand, and I also made comic at the same time and illustrations and they became more and more realistic so I was drawing full of sinewing clothes and wrinkles and kinds of complicated shading. So when I stared doing "Junkyard", a short film that I directed and wrote, I figured that it would be way too laborious to draw in that style and do it frame by frame for 18 minutes. So then I decided to film everything with actors first and trace the bodies of the actors. I've never been a real fan of rotoscoping before. I didn't want to trace the faces, so I developed a technique where I made all the heads from clay. I filmed them from all sides and I used them as a reference for the animation. It's sort of a mix between stop motion, rotoscoping, and animation. And I used the same technique for "Montage of Heck", the film from Brett Morgen about Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana. I think one of the problems with rotoscoping in general is that sometimes it feels like it's a filter applied to live action, and it feels like you're not watching the real thing. It's as if you're looking through a filter and seeing some world behind it. For me, it's very important that the characters feel like their an integral part of the environment, so I want to give those characters depth, and I think that's what distinguishes it from other rotoscoping. We developed a technique to make it feel like they were three dimensional instead of just flat figures and that makes them more relatable, I think. I'm really a fine artist. It's my intuition and I really want to make sure that everything looks very beautiful, or at least as beautiful as necessary for a shot. [upbeat instrumental music] One of my first ideas was to use real rotoscoping because I realize that the dialogues were so sophisticated, you know, and it was so much depth to the story that I thought that an adult audience would not buy into normal animation. They probably wouldn't be interesting in seeing that and it wouldn't convey all the subtleties of the dialogues. We also used rotoscoping, first of all, because it's more realistic approach to animation, and second of all, it remains ambiguous in story whether Alma is schizophrenic or experiencing some kind of nightmares or just flashbacks. To me it seemed that if we would use rotoscoping, we would already create a very unreal atmosphere while seeming to be realistic. So for the audience, it's not always clear when she is experiencing something, which is completely unreal, or that we would consider unreal, or if it's really happening. And I think the rotoscope helps with that because even the realistic scenes seem a bit suspicious because it's never really real. So it's a kind of strange experience for the audience. That was a guess when we started. I didn't know if it would work, I didn't know if it would get into an uncanny valley where people would feel appalled by the characters. And that was a big problem in the beginning and we solved that with all kinds of details from the technique. And I think we found a nice balance between it looking artificial and still compelling.

- I can't really move in this dress.

- I know.

- It's really firm, very firm.

- Yeah, it's very tight. [upbeat instrumental music]

- These are all the components that are needed to make "Undone". Storyboarding, layouts, floor plans, digital designs, live action recordings, editing, rotoscoping, 3D animation, 2D animation, coloring, shading, and compositing. One of the most important things in animation in general is the storyboarding process because you're not going to animate anything more that what you need so you need to be very sure of what you're going to animate and so I think most of the directing is actually in the stadium of the storyboarding. So for me, I've done it so many times myself. You know, I've done storyboards for over 150 commercials and for all my own films. When I read a story, I can almost imagine it and I can imagine it to be visualized in different ways. I can sort of, in my head I can turn a virtual camera around everything that's happening and search for the best way to find the best angle for something and to use visual storytelling in a way that it communicates even without dialogues. So with "Undone" it was different because it was too large of a project. There were 3,000 shots in the first season. So we get some very good storyboarders in Amsterdam and I would brief them in many different ways, dependent on how much time I had. Right now, I'm briefing them by actually thumbnailing whole episodes. So I make 400 thumbnails and then give it to them so they know exactly what they can draw. The storyboards are necessary to determine if the story's working. It's also very necessary for me, when I'm on the set with the actors, to know which angles we exactly need. Everybody's using the storyboards on the set so the DOP, me, the scrip supervisor, so we know that we shoot everything that we need. So another very important thing for "Undone" especially are the layouts and the floor plans because a lot of people think that we just shot live action and traced it. That's not how we work. We film the actors on a soundstage in Los Angeles but there's no actual set. There's just some grids that we need to determine the perspective afterwards for our visual sets. So what we do, we make sure that before we film an episode, we have designed every environment that's going to appear. So any room, any house, any exterior, we design it. We have a team of designers and we make floor plans with measurements. So when we're on the set, my assistant Nora Hoppener, she just uses tape on the ground to show the actors where to walls are so they don't cross the walls when they're acting. We have some props, like if some people are sitting on a chair we need a chair, of course, and there's a table. There's a table. Every prop that needs physical interaction has to be on the set, but that's all. It's really very much like "Dogville", the Lars von Trier film, but it's just almost like a play. The nice part for the actors was that usually on live action film sets, most of the time they're just waiting between scenes or between setups, camera setups. They have to wait for hours and watch their phone or read a book or something. And this was completely different because we could change between the setups very fast. There was one day where we did 144 camera angles in one day because we don't need to do very complicated setups. It's lighting and camera, that's it. So for them, it's almost like being on a stage and doing a play for twelve hours in a row, which is very tiresome but it's also very pleasant because that's what I want to do, they like to act. So the whole live action process is another part, and a very important part is the rotoscoping, of course. So once we film a whole episode, we edit it, and once that edit is locked, it's being sent to Texas to Minnow Mountain where there's a studio that does the rotoscoping, which is the tracing of the live action to sort of code it in lines, to simplify it in lines, to stylize it while maintaining all the emotions that are being conveyed by the actors. And the lined rotoscoping goes to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, all the other stuff happens. So in Amsterdam the designers are based, the storyboarders, the painters, the 3D studio animators, the compositors. The digital designs that have been made before we went on set, they're being sent to the painters. They project those designs, those layouts on canvas and then trace it and then they start painting it in very traditional, classical way. It's really a technique that has been in existence since the 17th century. It's called wet-in-wet, or all prima, where we actually use our palettes to mix colors but we also use the canvas itself to mix colors. That the thing with oil paint. Oil paint stays wet so once you have a certain area in a color and you mix another color in it, you get all these lively gradients that in a computer would look very sterile and when you paint it, it becomes lively and it feels like it has more soul, to me at least. Another very important component is the 3D animation. A lot of environments were painted but some of them, maybe 1/3 of them, they were projection mapped. So we would make 3D environments and then project paintings on top of them. So the painters would paint, for instance, a part of a chair and that's being projected on a 3D environment. And so we could do the whole house of Alma, for instance. It has been done that way. So you can put a camera everywhere you want and it still looks painted. Not completely because if you rendered that it's still a bit sterile because all the corners are too hard because it's rendered from a computer program. But we have digital touch-up artists who then use Photoshop to smooth out all the edges, to use painterly brushes to make it look like a real painting again. And 3D is being used a lot for the special effects. There's a lot of special effects in "Undone" like whole place is falling apart and very strange things that could only be done with this technique, I think, because once, for instance, a whole space transforms and it was oil painted to begin with, it should look like that all the way through. So that's why we use 3D animation and projection map, paint on top of that. So another very important part is, of course, the coloring and the shading. The shading was by biggest worry for "Undone" because for "Junkyard" I did all the shading myself, which took me two years of my life. It was extremely boring work but it was so boring that I could listen to lectures online so I became really smart. That's [chuckles] the good side of it, and for "Undone" I had no idea how we could do that. We calculated it, after we did a test, that we would need 120 animators to paint or shade on the characters frame by frame and that was just not doable. So we developed a technique of using the actual shading of the live action footage, get that through a filter, and then have 22 artists work on top of that and stylize it and make it better. And one part that I completely underestimated with "Undone" was the compositing. I was so used in doing it all myself because, you know, if you do all the paintings yourself and a lot of those things, then the compositing is not a big deal because it's already done by me so it'll all sort of connect more. With "Undone" we had nine classically-trained oil painters. They all were very good painters but they have different styles, and there's so many personalities who add to this puzzle that the compositing is really the place where the compositors make sure that everything looks the same by using color correction, adding vignettes, adding light, things like that, to bring it all together and make it look like one cohesive world. So we work with an edit of live action and every time that a shot is being completed in any kind of stadium, it will replace the live action footage in that moment, so it's like a puzzle that's growing and growing, growing. In the end, it's just all replaced by composited shots. So the edit is already locked before we start so we don't do any editing afterwards. It's all edited before we start animating. I think that the rotoscoping for "Undone" was different from the rotoscoping that has been done in the past. First of all, the basis of this whole style was really a classical look. I'm more influenced by old Disney films than by modern 3D animation coming from Hollywood, and more influenced by Dutch oil paintings from the 17th century. And then there's the combination of that very classical technique with very modern techniques like projection mapping. And I think that the rotoscoping in that way was different than what has been done before. It felt more integrate in an aesthetically-pleasing look. One of the scenes that caused the most problems for me was a scene where Alma was in a conversation with Sam. They had an argument. She disappears into one memory of her which was close to the pyramid where they gather around an old pit. When I read the story, I envisioned that while she was looking at the pit Sam's huge head would come out of that pit and suddenly she would be back into reality. And the way I saw it it was very spectacular, but once it was storyboarded, it made everybody laugh which was not the purpose of that shot. So then, when we animated it... It's often with projects like this that solutions are in the details. So the first time it was animated it made everyone laugh because it looked like it was silly. He came out of the pit and it looked like instead of sand there was spaghetti coming from his face and it didn't make any sense at all. So it's always in the details, you know. It's like the way we shaded it and that sand had to be beautifully animated with, in 2D by the way, most of it. Adding, you know, dust. Especially when you want to make things look big. All the little stuff that's happening should be small. If all the pieces that come from his head, for instance, are too big, it looks silly. It looks like it's fake. So it's always in those kind of details to make sure that it works. And finally, it's a beautiful scene. It's still weird, I mean still makes some people laugh but at least it's unsettling in a good way, I think. So there's one shot that we storyboarded in a way that made it very, very hard to film it because it was sort of a sequence of all kind of unrelated memories of Alma. In the storyboards, the moment where those scenes would sort of change would be the hands. So we would see the hand of Alma and suddenly it would be the hand of small Alma and we just told that whole visual story through the editing of hands. And doing that on a set is very, very difficult, and because we storyboarded it so well, we got away with it. And then that whole strange edit of moving cameras to make sure that everything was matching, that would have to be animated, too. And so we had to make a lot of paintings and sort of seemingly connect them by 3D animation and all kinds of tricks. And I think that's the scene, and it's a scene in episode four of which I'm very proud, especially because the whole trip, it could be a trip in Alma's head, we don't know, but it ends with her when she sees her mother arguing with her father when she was a small child, and she comes towards the camera with a bottle of pills and she said, "You need to take your pills, Alma." And suddenly we're in reality again. And that whole dialogue, the way we filmed it felt very emotional to me because to me it was very clear that she might be very confused and schizophrenic. And I think that's a thing that you can probably only do with animation. [melancholy instrumental music] I think 10 years ago, no distributor would think that this would a be successful. The whole story is done in a very risky way there's a lot of genres. It's comedy, it's tragedy, it's drama, it's also science-fiction, there's some psychological thriller elements to it. It's so much, I could have gone so wrong. What I learned from working with people is that I always thought that Hollywood produced so much formula films because too many people are interfering and then it all becomes like sort of an uninteresting thing and it gets dumbed down. And what I notice with "Undone", it's especially the opposite, is that when you're on a set, you're with a lot of very good brains and everybody adds to the whole thing, and you have much more like brainpower to actually do the right thing. And that's a very new experience for me and I love it because you can move so much faster. The other thing that I learned is that we were working on a very big time pressure. We had to do three hours of high level animation in one and a half year, and that time pressure... Actually, you know when I'm making my own films sometimes it takes me months to come up with ideas. Now, often I had a visual effects meeting at one o'clock and I would make up all the visual effects at 12. You know, pressure makes everything fluid. Your brain start working much, much faster. And then there's always the input of other people who can make sure that the ideas are developed even further. [corn horn honks] [cars crash]