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The Clickbait Title: Top 12 Things I Learned While Making Doll Movies
One of my hobbies is my intermittent obsession with making dolls. But I find the thought of making dolls for no storytelling purpose weak, as aesthetics alone offer little of substance to say. As such, when I first got into making dolls, I decided to make them of characters I knew well and then film a movie about them. Very specifically, I decided to make a Game of Thrones episode--which included sudden and permanent deaths, scenes performed in constructed languages, and "sexposition" scenes (which I replaced with expository scenes of cheesy pick-up lines to avoid the tonal clash of small dolls and hardcore sex).
My experience before that point with movie-making and screenwriting before that point included random projects for school using Windows Movie Maker and a basic understanding of the industry standard of the animation process. Now, two Game of Thrones-length films later worth of screenwriting, doll-making, voice acting, and video editing in Photoshop, I have finally learned I know nothing about film-making. Nonetheless, I wanted to discuss the things I have learned about storytelling, film-making, and doll-making in this bumbling endeavor--most specifically, the problems I encountered and how I solved them.
Stop-Motion Animation Takes Too Much Time
After pretending to do animations in first grade running at 1 frame per 5 seconds in MS Paint and then pretending to do animations at 1 frame per 15 seconds for various following projects, I knew I did not have the patience to make an hour worth of content nor the skill to make it look any good. I decided to simply film my hands in the frame and have the dolls bounce up and down in my hands in real time and called it a "stylistic choice". Did it look good? No. But it meant the project was finished. This was more important at the time, as it encouraged me and made me feel as if nothing was out-of-my-grasp to learn--a very healthy, growth mindset.
Adapting 100k Words into Two Hours is Hard
I got to experience the pain of a movie-maker converting books to screenplays during this process. I wrote the first film based on a fifty-thousand word section of the epistolary novels I write in my spare time. The second was inspired by a multi-month, play-by-text roleplay (for which I now sadly lack the source material). As I pared the first down to a one-hour run-time, I had the opportunity to cut or combine useless characters, such as the pointless appearance of a mentor, and form more cohesive themes by cutting irrelevant scenes, such as random explorations of the characters' hobbies. With many character moments removed and focusing in on the plot, not only did this result in tighter pacing, a more pronounced character arc, and a very explicit theme about standing-up for oneself. The process of paring this down also taught me about scriptwriting and the shear length of time it takes to read and perform words aloud.
But these cuts caused problems when I decided to make its sequel...
If You Cut From a Prequel, The Sequel Will Need To Be Reworked
When a minor character is cut from a prequel but then they become wildly relevant, this is very problematic for the adaptation of a sequel. For example, I removed the magical robot assistants of one of the characters because they added nothing to the story of the first--but then I merged them into one character named Nexus who stunned my audiences (of six people) in the second because robots were not established as existing in the world of the first movie. They seemed like deus ex machinas.
The world was also widely underdeveloped in the first movie, with the Nephilim especially underdeveloped. I treated them as a vague, distant threat to represent climate change--similar to the White Walkers of Game of Thrones. Once they had to become characters, however, their international plot would have been much too complicated to represent cohesively in a single hour. I ended up scrapping most of the arc and simply maintaining their characterizations--then reworking the entire outcomes of their plans based on a condensed version of the world. Most people loosely understood what was happening.
With the script written, it is off to find voice actors! And the only people I could bother dragging into this terrible, cursed project were my closest friends. Thus, at maximum, I had four voice actors. And as I quickly learned...
No One Ever Reads Your Lines The Way You Want
Possibly because I was a bad screenwriter, possibly because I watch too much anime, I had a very poor idea of how people spoke. All except for my very best-written lines, when read aloud, sounded inhuman and lifeless. However, I had a few remedies to wrangle strange performances into something that, while not necessary good, felt cohesive. The first was to cut the audio in-between words to change the pacing of the reading. This could turn "Please tell my wife I love her" to "Please... tell my... wife... I love her..." and that could make all the difference when timing it to the music and adding drama. Another trick was to pitch the audio up or down to add or remove menace from the speech. Lastly, it was possible to stretch or shorten the audio to enliven slow performances or add weightiness to quick ones.
With the audio for the entire movie set in stone, I set about to film. Of course, there were new challenges awaiting me.
I Do Not Have Infinite Money for Doll Sets
Budget would be a constraint in any project, but in the case of this project, my budget was 0. Nonetheless, as a tribute to Game of Thrones, I wanted my sets to remain as realistic as possible within these budget constraints. Wherever this was impossible, I strove to at least communicate the general mood of the set whilst being non-distracting. Thankfully, I am a female with remnant dolls from childhood--particularly, in the form of tea sets, food, and furniture and these were of an appropriate scale for the felt dolls I had made. After that, I began to employ my Theatre and art background to make the rest of what I needed. In theatre, pretty much everything is plywood. All those pieces of rusted metal on the set of Rent? Plywood. The stone bridges Javier jumps off in Les Miserables? Also plywood. Now, I did not have any plywood lying around but I had cardboard. If one can turn plywood into any material with good painting, one can turn cardboard into any material too. Of course, my theatre background also influence how I thought about set design--as I was going for one, diorama-like shot and not cinematic shots one might find on a film set.
I started everything with a base of black--from my knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons miniature painting--as this creates artificial depth in small items. Then, atop that, I used acrylics to turn pieces of cardboard into fake stone walls for my Draconic palace. I made a few extra tables out of cardboard. For the second film, I made an actual doll-house out of an old jewelry shelf and wallpapered the walls, as well as installs plastic windows--this was the height of my technical accomplishments. However, exterior scenes were nearly impossible to get to look right at the detail level I filmed at--so I simply went for printed, painterly backdrops. It did not always look perfect, but it usually looked, at least, not-distracting and communicated where the location was meant to be. My goal was to create one beautiful corner--or at least, one passable corner. I dressed the set with my doll food and furniture and set about filming with my jar-and-pencil tripod.
The issue with limited set budget and trying to get one beautiful corner is...
Small Sets Lead to No Room in Fight Scenes
While the small sets worked just fine for talking-head scenes (which, to be honest, was most of them), they became too constrained for larger scenes.
While special effects almost help with this scenario, it really does not. Black outs with blood splatters with characters dropping to the ground in the next scene was about the best I could manage to clearly convey who won and who lost, but I could rarely show the actual stakes of a fight scene with clear tactics, positioning, and obvious power levels. My plant to tackle this problem for future projects is to have fewer characters on screen and individual shots for individual attacks.
Dolls Without Mouths And Eyebrows Express Emotions Poorly & No One Remembers Everything Your Characters Say
This was not something I learned how to fix in these early screenplays but I have since begun studying cinematography, editing, and the Kuleshov effect. In these early films, I relied on my dialogue to tell the entire story. I jokingly referred to them as "radio dramas with doll visuals" because I ended up banking on dialogue to tell the whole story, save for marking dialogue and occasionally location. But not everyone can understand and parse everything that is said in a film--particularly with mumbled dialogue, without subtitles, and poor audio mixing. Furthermore, the dolls do not have emoting faces and it is difficult to determine how they are feeling simply by how animatedly they are bouncing.
It would have been a better film if I had learned to tell stories purely visually within the constraints of my dolls. But I did not. However, I do have a trailer for my upcoming doll webseries (which may or may never truly be finished) and this demonstrates my new knowledge of framing and my use of heavy-handed symbolism to tell the dolls' stories even when they have no dialogue at all.
This highlights the contrast between Ymver, the Bard King, and the Philosopher King, high in her ivory tower. Ymver is painted as warm, earthy. His war paint is still on his face but his kantele harp is at his feet--showing both his roles as fighter and as entertainer. Meanwhile, the Philosopher King plays lantriculi and drinks tea--symbolizing a more posh and intellectual character. This is an improvement, but I know I have a lot to learn in this regard.
With Pale Characters and a Dark Backdrop, Hands Will Wash Out
I learned my lesson in the second movie and wore a pair of black gloves. This helped in most scenes except for when my phone auto-focused on the clips on my gloves instead of on the dolls.
Felt Dolls Do Not Stand Up On Their Own
I strategically blocked my dolls around parts on the stage where there was either waist-high furniture or walls. For future doll-related productions, I have switched to wooden peg dolls, which do not have articulation in the waist but gain the advantage in crowd scenes when they can freely stand anywhere in the scene. This prevents dolls from falling over and causing distractions to the audience.
Photoshop Is A Terrible Video Editor
I should have just learned a real video editing software. It runs at about 3 frames per second when I edit long films. Both movies got corrupted and needed to be remade twice. Is my solution to teach myself to use a real video editing software? No, it's to make shorter videos--if it crashes, it is much faster to edit a 10 minute video than it is to edit an hour long video. Furthermore, my internet does not even allow me to upload something this large--my father had to use his company internet to upload the last two. That is what gave me the idea to turn future doll films into a webisodes instead.
Conclusion
As you can see, these two long projects have taught me a great deal about the process of filmmaking within my odd, specific constraints and I have very little to show for my knowledge. However, I think the ultimate thing I learned from this entire process is not to be afraid of trying new things: It is ALWAYS possible to iterate on old work and produce better work in the future. Some of these works even have ended up relating to my job--such as Photoshop video-editing and writing for performance--and others have simply taught me the importance of not-inhaling toxic glue fumes or how to achieve the level of detail required in miniatures. In the meantime, it has been a great learning experience and a very exciting journey.
Please be excited for any upcoming doll-related media--particularly my webseries "World of Fates"!
RESOURCES
Here are the films in question. I do not claim to own the music, sound effects, nor most of the VFX in them--and if I were taken to trial, I'd call it "for educational use" and then secondarily, "parody". My hat is off to anyone who manages to watch through them both:
The First Doll Film: https://tinyurl.com/worldofthrones
The Second Doll Film: https://tinyurl.com/worldofpowers
Notably, I did make a "Behind the Scenes" video after the creation of both of these movies on my YouTube channel and, while not as up-to-date, it will likely reflect my emotions closer to the time than this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDUbd7GVWcQ
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