UPDATE January 27th, 2023: Lachlan has this week received a 2023 Oscars nomination. His film, An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It, has been nominated for best animated short film. How good is that?!

What would you do if a large, flightless bird showed up to your workplace and told you that nothing is real? You’d probably freak the heck out, and rightly so. This is the premise of Brisbane-based filmmaker Lachlan Pendragon’s stop-motion film, An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It, which was named Best Australian Short Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival Short Awards earlier this month. We recently caught up with Lachlan to chat about the flick (an ace comedy with a meta twist) and the art of stop-motion.

What inspired An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It? The obvious comparisons are with The Truman Show or something by Charlie Kaufman, but in animation there’s also a long history of stories that poke fun at their own animated artifice. You can trace it back to some of the first instances of animation called ‘lightning sketches’, where the cartoonist would draw a character on a board and it would come to life. Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck or Tex Avery’s body of work are famous for these meta gags, where the processes of animation are revealed for humorous effect. Like Daffy Duck looking to camera and saying, “Hey! Where’s the scenery?” because the animator’s forgotten to draw a background.

My project was about figuring out what’s special about the medium of stop-motion. It’s very possible nowadays to create CGI that looks like stop-motion. Likewise, in stop-motion we’re seeing aesthetics that look closer to CGI thanks to technologies like 3D printing. So, for me, it was about harnessing the handmade qualities and imperfections of stop-motion and coming up with a story that plays into that, to remind the audience that what they’re watching is hand-crafted stop-motion filmmaking.

There’s behind-the-scenes stuff in stop-motion that, from the puppet’s perspective, would be terrifying. For example, their faces and limbs are detachable. There are trays of faces lying around that are used to create the lip-sync animation. To adjust the pupils on a puppet, you literally stick a pin in their eye. Absolutely terrifying. So, a horror comedy seemed like a great place to narratively integrate some of the animation processes.

Tell us a bit about the process of making a stop-motion film – what’s involved, and how long does it take? It takes a long time. All animation does, but with stop-motion there’s less room for error. When you’ve finished animating something, it’s hard to go back and tweak things, so the planning and preparation is very important. There’s a lot of writing, storyboarding, recording dialogue and live-action video reference. These things can be quickly made, edited or discarded until you have a solid blueprint for the film. File management can also become a big problem, especially when you’re capturing thousands of photos.

A fun part of the process is called fabrication. This is where the puppets and miniature sets are made. There are countless materials to choose from and they’re often sourced from everyday places or craft stores. There’s so much untapped potential in this space because the possibilities are endless. In the film, there’s a water cooler prop that’s about 10cm tall. I initially couldn’t figure out how to make the water bottle that sits in the cooler, but I ended up finding a bottle of food colouring at the supermarket that was just the right size. The food colouring was blue, so I used it to tint the water and give it that lovely aqua colour.

Next comes animating – my favourite bit. This is where everything comes to life. I take a photo, move the puppet, take another photo… It sounds boring and repetitive, but it’s actually really engaging. It’s like a never-ending puzzle with the satisfying payoff of playing back the images and seeing something come to life. It’s a very godlike experience, but very slow. Five seconds of animation is a good day for me. All up, it took about 10 months and 500GB worth of photos to animate an 11-minute short film. (This is where something like Dropbox is great for storing backups in case the unthinkable happens and a hard drive corrupts or gets lost.)

Where did you learn the art of stop-motion? I made my first stop-motion film in high school and really enjoyed it. I actually thought I was going to study live-action filmmaking, so I applied, but my grades weren’t good enough and I didn’t get in. So instead, I studied animation at Griffith Film School in Brisbane. In the first year they teach you a little bit of everything – CGI, hand-drawn, life-drawing, art direction. Nothing was clicking until my second year, when I got back into stop-motion animation. It just felt right, and I’ve stuck with it ever since.

What do you love about the medium? It’s a very enjoyable way to make films, regardless of the end product. It’s unique and impractical and inefficient, but I love the spontaneity or improvisational aspect of it. You essentially get one shot; one take. Everything comes together in the moment and it’s up to you to make it work, as you can’t fix it up later. You’ve got to be ready to improvise and anticipate what the character needs to do next to get the performance you’re after. I guess it’s like the jazz of animation.

What was the first stop-motion film you made about? It was about a tough-looking biker guy who gets in an elevator with a young celebrity and reacts like a teenager who’s just seen Justin Bieber. It was for a high school media assignment where the story revolved around breaking a stereotype. I don’t like watching it these days, but it shows how far I’ve come.

Now that you’ve won a MIFF Shorts Award, what’s next for you? It’s such an honour to win the award. I’m still absorbing it and it doesn’t quite feel real. I’m currently finishing the written component for my studies at Griffith Film School. After that, I’m excited to explore ideas for the next project (most likely another short film). The long-term dream would be a feature film.

Was the ostrich right? Is the world fake? Without getting too existential… yes.