Behind the Scenes

THE IDEA – A TABLETOP FILM

I am coining the phrase tabletop movie for this one. I wanted to do everything myself. I mean, fuck, I am building this website to pander to IMDB so I can give those who deserve it credit. And by tabletop I mean tabletop. After writing the first pass of the screenplay in December I went about getting all I needed to make the movie without anyone’s help.

A QUESTION OF SCALE

The first question I needed to answer had two meanings. Scale? What is the scale of the movie? For me this is two questions. Scale, as in how big of a production it would be. If I need 100 sets and CGI space battles and monsters, and a cast of a 100 and trains, planes and automobiles it will be a huge production and with a big budget. This is not a huge production with a big budget. It is me, working a 9-5, spinning plates and doing everything.

The second understanding of the term scale is the physical size of the puppets, the sets, and everything really. And this is where it gets interesting (relatively speaking). Scale when it comes to puppets, action figures, dolls, etc, is based on it’s relation to someone being 6 foot tall. So a 12 inch puppet, doll or action figure, like GI Joe or Barbie is to 1:6 scale, as 6 x 12 inches is 6 foot. And this goes all the way down the miniatures I used, created by the talented team at PRINT OF THE DEAD, which were 1:64 scale, also 1:72 and 1:56 scale. For this, and because on ETSY and EBAY and everywhere else, 1:12 scale was the best choice for Eli, Ruthie, Babka and the rest.

1:12 scale, or 6 inch characters, means you can use doll house furniture and clothing, and there are so many sellers out there to help. It meant, I didn’t need to make a couch, or windows, or shelves, or the refrigerator. I just found someone who already makes them for dolls house enthusiasts. The clothes too, for Eli and the others, although I did make his holey shorts and Ruthie and Mrs Goldfarb’s camo outfits.

The 1:12 scale decision quite quickly allowed me to create the main part of Eli’s apartment, the living room and kitchen.

Once those rooms were made, the story expanded somewhat, when I added more of an Eli and Ruthie love story. Suddenly I needed new places, new rooms in the building and new sets. And for the apartment I added a bedroom, a closet and a bathroom. For the building, nicknamed 245 because of its street address and after the chemical Trioxin 245 from Return of the Living Dead, I added a hallway, a stairwell, the rooftop, the awning out the front and an entrance, the lobby and mailboxes, and the laundry room.

So, yes this was a tabletop movie, with 80% of Dreidel of the Dead filmed on a dining table that may never fully be restored to former glory thanks to the paint and glue. Then a few scenes on the coffee table as it was shorter and wider, like the stairwell scene, and some of the messier, bloodier, snowier scenes on trestle tables in the cabin in the garden.

And honestly, I loved building the sets and making them look as real as possible. I want to build more. I think all my nieces will get dolls houses now, even if they don’t want them.

THE CHARACTERS

The decision to film this as a stop motion movie meant I needed posable characters. This is fine, and the 1:12 scaling also was a smart move as there were a lot of options for bodies I could use. But with the look of the movie being somewhat realistic and not cartoon like, I wanted to do something different and new, and so I used 3-D printing technology to make the heads.

Passing photos of myself (BLOOM), Michelle Schenker (RUTHIE) and a human version of Jay Sherman (ELI) I had a 3-D designer create STLs of our heads so I could get PRINT OF THE DEAD to print them. This gave us realistic looking characters just to scale.

CREATING NEW YORK CITY

I lived and loved in New York for a decade and I love it with all I am. Spending a chunk of my life, either side of a couple of years on the West Coast, in one of the greatest cities in the world I needed to create a New York that felt true to my memory of it. For me New York was apartment life, bars, the subway and the food. It is a very distinct lifestyle and it was that, twinned with nostalgia, that I wanted to show the viewers.

And so, after the apartment, which is loosely based on all the apartments I have ever been to from my friends Victoria and Mayur in the East Village, to my drinking buddies Robin and Tim in my old neighbourhood Hell’s Kitchen, from psycho ex Christina in Brooklyn Heights, to Michelle on Staten Island, I started with the city.

For me the city has distinct components, the streets and avenues, the corner bodega, the Irish bar, and the subway. And so I had to create a subway car for just one scene. I lived in Midtown and so for work I would catch the R and W to Cityhall every day. For friends uptown it would be the A train, or the 1. And so I needed a scene where ELI and RUTHIE travel on this iconic transit system.

Note: As you can see I tried green screening this one to superimpose going through tunnels and stations. However, due to the shadows it went wrong, so I chased a friend who recorded their journey for me, and filmed the scene with that running on a laptop through the windows. And it kinda works.

I had to choose a location for Eli to live, a distinct neighbourhood that could have the Jewish block feel. Having been all over from the top to toe of the island and across the five boroughs I had options. The Upper East Side felt too clean and preppy for Eli. The East Village, my old haunts of St Marks Place and Houston, seemed too hip. My old neighbourhood of Hell’s Kitchen was an option but I wanted him closer to both the park and Zabar’s and so moved ELI to the Upper West Side, somewhere in the 80s.

It meant that I could create a street in keeping with the neighbourhood, with fire escapes and awnings with the billboard for Morley Nelson’s Uncontained on one of the buildings.

There is a scene in Times Square, and the bus is focused on. As is the outside of Eli’s building, both where Bloom ends up for the whole movie, and the rooftop. This is a New York movie, a Jewish New York movie, with a Hanukkah theme, and a LOT of movie Easter eggs.

Note: It was thought that I could turn the movie into a drinking, much like the Withnail and I drinking game, but rather than when Withnail or I take a drink, it would be when the viewer spots a movie reference. The issue with that idea, being this parody, have over 70 in less than 30 minutes, from the Overlook Hotel carpet, to Jason masks, to dialog, and the occasional shot, like Eli’s entrance being Shaun’s day two morning entry in Shaun of the Dead. Still a fun game, but would end up very messy indeed.

THE KIT

This is where the insanity comes in. I filmed the whole movie on my dining table and coffee table, the desk in my office for the scenes of Bloom below the window, and the trestle tables in the cabin for the messy street scenes and Bloom’s death, using two desk lamps and a blue light for SADS as the sun, using an iPhone 11. An 11! They are on the what now? 16?

I put the stills for the Stop Motion elements into Filmmaker Pro on my phone and exported as video and put the whole thing together in Filmora15. Am no movie editor so it was a lot of tweaking.