(gentle bright music) (audience chattering) - [Announcer] Welcome everyone to Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(gentle bright music continues) (audience applauding) (pensive music) - [Daughter] Mom!

(mom gasping) (mom sighing) (bright music) - [Narrator] You are on your way to becoming a woman.

There are three simple rules for a woman to succeed in life.

(dramatic music) Beware of everything, especially men.

- I did not exist before I met you.

My soul was empty.

- The moment Zelma fell in love with Sergei, her neurons started to release three neurotransmitters, norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine.

(dramatic music continues) - [Sergei] Your ass is sagging there right under the cheeks.

Without me, you wouldn't know your flaws.

(mischievous music) - If you plucked your eyebrows and wore short skirts, you'd be able to get a rich guy who would take care of you.

♪ I'm a girl and have a girl repertoire ♪ - I'll be the best girl I can be.

- Let's go.

What a great day to get married.

(reflective music) - Do you have a secret?

- You are the one.

You can change everything.

♪ I feel so small before this daunting ♪ - I would give everything I have for you to love me, except for just one thing.

(animal hissing) ♪ I'll dance on the graves ♪ of my many mistakes ♪ ♪ The cold, shiny stones, ♪ they teach the wounds ♪ ♪ Tick tock, tick tick tickety tock ♪ ♪ But moving forward, I'm moving on ♪ ♪ Tick tock, tick tick tickety tick ♪ ♪ I'm moving forward, I'm maturing ♪ - Love your children more than your husband and everything will be all right.

♪ Could it be you ♪ (children avatars popping) (audience applauding) - Ah.

Thank you so much for coming.

You could be doing so many other things tonight, except some of you have to be here, right?

You have no choice, but some of you had choice and you came here.

I'm very happy and grateful.

I was going to tell you today, that's the plan, on how this film was made, the "My Love Affair with Marriage," step by step.

I am an independent animator, which means that I create something that nobody asks, no Netflix, no Disney, no Pixar came to me and begged on their knees, please make this film.

I conceived the film and I had no money and somehow we managed to organize a team and bring it all together and make this film.

Are you curious to see how it happens?

- [Audience] Yeah.

- All right, so yeah, so let me see if I can push this button and yes, it took seven years to make this animated feature film.

Seven years, you remember, what did you do in September 2015?

That is exactly when we started making this film.

Remember 2015?

Some of us at that time still thought that we will have a woman president next year.

Some of you have, I think you've been maybe middle school, no?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, so, you know, so it's a long, long time.

It's a whole lifetime, so many things can happen, and know I sat down from that moment in September 2015 and I worked for seven years straight until I finished the film, which is kind of a crazy concept.

Seven years.

So my first film, my first animated feature film after 17 short films, I made "Rocks in my Pockets" and that was a very simple film to make because it had only my voiceover, only one person spoke that I talked to always throughout.

You can see no other actors.

And that film cost about $300,000 to make, which is very cheap for an animated feature film and I delusively thought that my new film would be about the same or a little bit more.

And you know, if you are not delusional, you don't start a project, okay?

And that is my greatest advice to all of you.

If you want to start something amazing and something big, you just have to say, "Well, I start it tomorrow and I finish the day after tomorrow, and it's gonna cost me just like $5" and you just plunge into it, and then seven years later you're like, "Oh, I see that took longer and it was more difficult."

(audience laughing) But that is, to me, that's the point, like you want to make something, you just start doing it.

And so how does it start?

So it started with writing a script, you know, and again, I was very delusional.

I wrote in the script 30 singing and talking characters, 30, not three, not 13, 30 singing and dancing, sorry, singing and talking characters, but not only that, I decided to put science in this film.

And you know, I'm an artist, I'm not a scientist, but I decided to do neuroscience and so I had to do research.

What is neuroscience of love?

What happens in your brain when you fall in and out of love?

And so then this whole process took 24 drafts and it took one year and I involved three scientists because I wanted to get the science as precise as I could.

The main character, her name is Zelma.

Here you see her at age seven, she's running through the village.

And here at the end of the story, she's 29, banged about by life, like bad experiences, bad marriages, and kind of like this disillusioned person at the end of the film.

And then we have Mythology Sirens, three singing trio who teach Zelma what does it mean to be a woman and what is love.

You know, we all learn what is love from where?

From pop songs.

And so these... (audience laughing) These sirens teach Zelma how to love.

And then we have main character Biology, and as you can see, her design is based on a neuron.

Do you see an axon and dendrites?

Yeah, and then the nucleus, that's her design.

And she comments on what's happening on Zelma's brain while a Zelma falls in and out of Love.

And we had to have 24 songs in the film because as I said, the songs are essential part of the film and I wrote lyrics for 24 songs and we had to start with songs because in animation, it's easier and cheaper to record soundtrack before you start animating, so we hired composer Kristian Sensini, who worked on my previous film, "Rocks in My Pockets," and he's Italian.

I have worked with him on one film, but I never met him before because he lives in Italy.

Who has the time to go to Italy?

(audience laughing) And he just didn't have time to go to New York, so he composed these songs, these 24 songs.

You see notes, he wrote the notes, and then we decided that we have to have partners because we have to hire actors, we have to pay Kristian, and so the partners.

Me and my life partner, Sturgis Warner, I always say that he's the only producer I sleep with.

(audience laughing) I was sleeping before he became producer and so somehow it worked, life relationship and business relationship worked out really well and we organized a business entity called Marriage Project LLC because you need to do that.

That's the first step.

And here you can see our beautiful studio on third floor, on the top floor, 10 windows reflecting the sky.

That's where the studio is and later on you will see what's happening inside the studio.

It's in a industrial area in Brooklyn in Sunset Park.

And then we have Roberts Vinovskis, a Latvian producer.

He was a co-producer for "Rocks in My Pockets" and he said, "I want to collaborate with you on your next film."

And so he stepped in and said, "I want to be part of "My Love Affair with Marriage" and his studio is called Studio Locomotive and it's in a beautiful city of Riga that I highly recommend you to go to, but only in summertime.

In wintertime it is exactly as it is here.

You would be like, "Why did I travel?

I already got the same thing."

(audience laughing) But in the summertime, it's amazing.

And then we got another partner, Raoul Nadalet, from Luxembourg, and his company is called Antevita Films.

And he was in charge to finance and to help with post-production sound.

And so then we were, once we got all together, we decided that we wanted to hire the best actors, right?

You think it's a good idea to hire the best actors you can, right?

Well, there is a SAG-AFTRA union, and they said, "We don't have a... We understand that you are a low-budget operation, but we don't have low-budget discount on our papers, so you have to pay the same price to hire actors as Pixar and Disney," and we were just so scandalized because where will we get money?

It's a lot of money to pay the same rates as Pixar and Disney.

But what you're gonna do, so we said we are gonna run a Kickstarter campaign.

And you heard of Kickstarter, right?

Yeah, Kickstarter campaign is a very strenuous activity.

I highly not recommend to people with fragile nervous systems.

(audience laughing) And I am one of these people who has a fragile nervous system.

I had the panic attacks during the Kickstarter campaign three times a day.

I barely survived it, but we had to raise $124,000.

That's a lot of money, wouldn't you say?

It's a lot of money, and if you're like $1 short, you don't get the money, so you have to raise it.

And at the end, we went past our goal and we raised $132,000, which is very highly successful, so my panic attacks were worth for something.

So then, now that we had money to record actors and hire the best actors we could, we started hiring, casting, and hiring.

So, Dagmara Dominczyk, I don't know if you had seen this show "Succession".

- [Audience] Yeah.

- [Signe] She is a part of that show.

She's an amazing, amazing actor and I really did not, you know, to cast main character, you see the characters.

She had to play the character from ages seven till 29.

That's a lot.

And also she had to story-tell, and she had to do all these other things like voiceover and storytelling and the dialogues.

and I think she's a spectacular actress, but I really didn't want to hire anyone for Zelma until I met her and I saw what she can do.

She's amazing, talented actor.

And Michele Pawk was Biology.

She's now in "Wicked" show in Broadway.

I don't know if you saw it.

And Trio Limonade, they sang the trio, the singing trio, like here is how they look in life performing.

They're beautiful sirens.

And then I gonna, oh, Cameron Monaghan.

You know Cameron from "Shameless"?

- [Audience] Yeah.

- [Signe] So he's one of the husbands in the film.

He's not a good husband, but you know, he tries.

(audience laughing) And Matthew Modine is a famous actor.

You know Matthew Modine?

He's also in "Stranger Things" and, you know.

- [Audience] Yeah.

- And Stephen Lang is from "Avatar".

He's the bad guy.

In "Avatar" he plays villain here.

Here he plays a lover, not a very good lover, but you know.

(audience laughing) What you gonna do?

But not entirely a villain.

So, Emma Kenney is from "Shameless" but I'm gonna flip through our actors now quite quickly because we may not have time.

I just want you to see we have a very talented and diverse cast from New York, the best New York and LA actors that we could, who could agree and who we knew how to hire and how to cast.

It's a really wonderful cast.

And then once we recorded all these amazing actors, we started editing the soundtrack because it had to be edited into one comprehensive soundtrack, and so me and sound designer, Arjun Sheth in New York, we put together everything.

It took six weeks to edit this whole complicated timeline.

Once the soundtrack was recorded, all the songs were in place and all the dialogue was in place, we were ready for production.

And so production starts in Brooklyn and so I want to introduce you to our Brooklyn team.

So here you can see... Am I blocking people's view, right?

I'm, yep.

(gasping) (audience laughing) Am I blocking your view?

- No, I can see.

- Okay, so here's our team.

You can see this is Sturgis, my partner, and also film's producer and casting director and carpenter and he did a lot of things.

Next to him is Sophia, she's from Ukraine.

Then me, I'm from Latvia, then is Yasmin, and she's from Turkey, and there is a YuPu from China, so it's a multinational cast in Brooklyn, New York.

And here is our lunch table.

You know, in my studio is a rule.

When you come to work at 10 o'clock, you work quietly, you work as much as you can, as quickly as you can and as quietly as you can until 1:30, then everybody drops whatever they doing and we gather around the table, and the rule is anything goes at this table.

You could laugh at me, I can laugh at you, or we can have fun together.

It's an equality table.

And then at two o'clock we all wrap it up and we go back to work.

Isn't that, I mean, I think it's amazing to have such a lunch table.

And then so we start with creating backgrounds.

So this is a sketch, you see.

I don't know if you can see here, but over here is a living room, here is a kitchen, over there is a bathroom, and there is a hallway.

It's my sketch that I give to Sturgis, my head carpenter, and he makes sense of these scribbles.

Can you make sense of these scribbles?

- Yeah.

- Somewhat, right?

But not only he have to make sense of these scribbles, he would have to measure them exactly.

And so then he takes woods out, and here's Sturgis.

He is a head carpenter with his two favorite tools, which is a ruler and wood glue, and then he starts building these sets.

You know, in Sunset Park where we are, there are a lot of carpenters and at the end of the day, when carpenters build a shell or whatever they build, and then they throw little scraps of wood out in a garbage and Sturgis at night walks like a night cat and he pulls out of garbage all these pieces of wood and he brings them back in the studio as happy as a clam and says, "Oh, this is my treasures."

And so then he makes these treasures.

Later, when you watch the film, you will see how this set, starting with the wooden pieces transforms into this beautiful, beautiful set.

And here is another set also made of wood.

And here how he makes steps.

And here's a set that is not colored yet, just the wooden pieces.

He made these bottles from sticks and he, I don't know how you call this technique, but there's another set.

Here's a hallway set, and here's a set.

Remember this set, this is one of my favorite sets, but when he made this set, I said, "It's too regular, it's too geometrical and I can't have too geometrical.

Camera doesn't like the geometrical, I don't like it to geometrical."

And then we found a way around it.

And so here is the final set of the final scene that you will later see in the movie.

So, you see Sturgis is looking through the window.

You will later see the transformation of this set.

So after we are done with a wooden part, we cover all these sets with paper-mache, with paper soaked in glue.

The reason we do that, if you see this horse has a wooden texture, you see the wooden texture, and this wooden texture, if you paint it, the texture would still be seen through the paint.

And audience would know subconsciously, or even consciously, they would know the proportion.

They would know that this is a small object created of piece of wood and I didn't want audience to even think about what is the scale, what is the relationship of human figure and this particular horse, so I wanted to kind of cover everything up so nobody would know what the scale is and so that's why we covered up every single set with paper-mache.

Here's Yasmin, she's about to start and she's already started covering one of the sets in paper.

And here's stages and here's the set is completely covered in paper.

Here's that you saw earlier, the church, it's covered entirely in paper.

And here, I don't even know if you can see what it is, right, but it's one of the apartments.

Later, when you have a paint, you'll see what it is.

And here's the final set, the end scene set covered in paper-mache.

Here's Sophia, she's making trees of paper-mache entirely of paper.

There is nothing inside the trees, no wire, nothing.

It's just the glue on paper holding up.

And her task was to create a forest, so she's creating a forest.

And here Yasmin is working on a mountain.

In Riga, there's this mountain called, in the middle of city, it's called GaiziFkalns and so we recreated this GaiziFkalns very stylized way.

And then many years ago, I don't know, like 10 years ago, on a street, again, you know, New York streets are so full of great garbage.

You know, it's really hard to sometimes go anywhere because you run across a great garbage, then you have to take it, and then you can't go to like fancy theater play.

But we found this, you know what they are, right?

They're cash register, you know, the cash receipt things that somebody put it out on the street and we were like, "We don't know what it is good for, but it's definitely good for something."

And so we picked it up and then in the middle of production we were like, "Oh my God, it makes a great wallpaper."

And so you can see how Yasmin made a pattern and then how she put it together and created wallpaper and here is the room of wallpaper with this.

And here she's making the patterns.

And there is another room with wallpaper.

And so as you can see, Yasmin has to take all kinds of complicated poses to finish, like do the finishing touches.

In the background, you can see Shalea is doing finishing touches for one of the props.

And me, deep, deep in the background, I have no time to raise my head because I have to animate.

I had to make about 60 or 80,000 drawings.

I didn't count, but approximately it's 60,000 or 80,000 drawings, so I really didn't have time to raise my head to look at the camera.

So here's Yasmin.

Do you see what she's doing?

You remember that regular set with the geometrical shapes?

She's covering it with tissue paper soaked in glue to break up the regular, these lines that, you know, these rigid lines, she's covering it up with like broken up tissue paper.

And here you can see this tissue paper covering the wooden little planks.

And here Yasmin put in a wooden stain, wood stain, and in the three different colors and she really broke up the irregular texture of the wooden planks.

So then after we cover everything in paper-mache, we do the first coat is black and the next coat is lighter color, and then in lighter color and lighter color, and we have about five to seven coats of paint on each set, which is a lot of paint.

And here you can see all our assistants and interns are lined up and coloring everything in black.

And so one of the interns here is painting the trees, the forest in black.

Yasimin here, she's finishing food, she's painting food for one of the scenes.

And Sophia is finishing the truck for one of the trucks that we had in the film.

And as you can see, Yasmin really has to do yoga when she's painting.

(audience laughing) And I'm sitting there in the background, I cannot raise my head because I'm too busy making these drawings.

And Yasmin also did wooden stain to imitate parquet, you know, the wooden stain floor.

And here's the final set that is finished.

Later on you will see the textures like here.

You know, when you look at this set, you see that the set, the black paint comes through.

You can see the layer of the dark of the black and then the lighter paint and lighter, and it creates a certain texture that later on, we need that texture to have a handmade aspect.

I wanted the audience to know that this film is created by hand as opposed of Pixar or Disney films that are created by 3D software.

I really wanted to have that handmade aspect because one of the themes of the film is culture versus nature and everything that we are living in a culture is handmade and I wanted just to have that aspect of handmadeness.

And you can see me in the background there, sitting there.

I have no time to raise my head.

(audience laughing) And here's another, you can see again the texture, how the texture is still visible through all the paint.

And the next step, once the set is ready, we bring it in a dark room and we do stop motion photography.

And you can see in a background is a table and you can see it's in a seahorses, right?

And then little table across it so it's like handmade totally, not professional.

And on top, these grids for the lighting, they're totally made, Sturgis made them totally not professionally.

We didn't buy anything, we just created these, and these are the cheapest lights we could buy for like $1 each, so it wasn't expensive, but this rail that you see, that is a stop motion rail, and one of my friends stop motion animator, Jimmy Picker, was going out of business because, you know, he retired.

He said, "I already got my Oscar, what do I need more?"

And so he sold me this rail for quite cheap money because he had no use for it and so I bought it and I had, we used it quite a lot for the project.

And so here you can see a little bit more the setup, you know, the background and the lighting, and you can see how like the white part is not, you know, we painted it white, and then we had to lit it up and we had to do the gels, the blue gels so because otherwise it was too yellow, and to get the white feel, we had to cover lights with blue.

And then when we wanted to change the room to pink, we put pink gel on top.

And here's a night scene.

As you can see in the background, Sturgis, he was a lighting designer and so he was putting the lights.

Now night scenes are very hard to do because you know, you have to have enough light for camera to pick up images, but it has to be dark enough so that an audience would believe it's night and they're hard to do.

Here is another set which is much more simply, like dispersed light with umbrella and that was very simply lit.

And you can see the church scene now, it's beautiful, right?

And you saw the beginning how it has created.

And so this lighting is also very simple, just two lights backlighting, doing the backlight, and then in front there's one more light lighting it from front.

Here's a sculpture that our artist friend, Sandra Ossip, lent us.

She was in a building, there are many artists where the studio is and she had these very tragic sculptures, you know, bombed out buildings, and I said, "These are amazing buildings.

Can I borrow and put them in my film?"

And so she did, she gave me these sets, these sculptures to use for the set.

And later on she moved to Ann Arbor.

I hope she's here somewhere.

But yeah, that's a great collaboration with artists.

And here is, you can see how the camera, camera actually moved from deeper there and it was moved with the help of the rail through those buildings.

You will see later in the film how it was done, what the result is, but you see now how it was done.

And this is one of my favorite sets.

You can see the coffin in the middle of the bus.

And I wanted to have the mood of church because somebody had died and I wanted to have that feeling of something spiritual and something transitional transformative and I think the lighting is really, really nice.

And here is the lighting for that set.

Remember that geometrical set?

And so this set now is covered with tissue paper and lighting was very difficult because it was very too orange and so we had to put a lot of blue gels before we could shoot it.

Here is another night scene.

And here is more night scenes.

And here is like a apartment, just a normal apartment, normal life.

And you had to squeeze the camera into these unexpected strange places and it was really difficult sometimes because set is not small, but it's not also large and you had to put the camera in and then you had to use the right lens so you can actually take a picture.

And so there's more of the shooting.

And so here is one of the final pictures that we took of that apartment and here's more of the final pictures.

I will show you later on what happens then.

Then we had elements of stop motion.

For example, here you can see Sturgis is holding in his hand dentist tool.

You know dentist, when they clean your teeth between the gaps?

We had to scratch, one of the characters scratches the walls and Sturgis had to, in stop motion, animate the scratches appearing on the walls.

And so we use the Dragonframe, a software that captures stop motion animation.

And now you can see how these scratches go, right?

And I go, oops.

I go back and they go back again, so they appear and then they go again.

And so one of the characters scratches this set and it was really nerve wracking because if Sturgis made a mistake, we would have to rebuild the set again and recover it with the paper-mache, but he didn't make a mistake, which is an amazing achievement.

So animation.

I was animating everything on paper.

You can see like next to me is a printout, black and white printout of the photos that we took and I am putting approximately where the characters are and what they do and then I animate on paper.

The reason I animate on paper, and I don't feel good about it, right?

You know, it's just, it's a waste of environment and every time I'm thinking that I killed personally, I killed a tree to make this film, it really makes my heart bleed because I really want the tree to be alive.

But on the other hand, I also feel that I want to, the thing is that digital media doesn't really excite my brain for some reason because I learned to draw pencil on paper and there's something magical happens when I touch, when the pencil touches the paper and I hear that sound and I feel the vibration and suddenly it goes into my brain and my brain goes on fire and I have all these ideas, and so it's very difficult for me to animate on like a tablet or Wacom, I just don't know.

Or not even Wacom even on the, you know, what is the other one, the big one?

You know what I mean?

(audience laughing) Yes, but so I animate in the summer, here's the summer and here's the winter.

And you can see there are a lot of papers discarded behind me.

And I don't throw a paper out ever.

I animate and I do sketches on papers until they have been used like five times and then we use it for paper-mache.

So it's just like we use the paper all the time, reuse it, recycle it.

And here I animate also during the pandemic.

And then this is pile of pencil stubs.

Can you guess how many pencil stubs it took to animate to make 60,000 drawings?

Yeah, I thought it would be at least 1,000 pencils, right?

No, but it turns out that 662 pencils.

We counted them at the end.

So yeah, I don't know why the pile looks so impressive, but it's only 662 pencils.

(audience laughing) So then when I finished animation and I have all these drawings, I have to shade them because remember how the backgrounds where I had the texture?

I also wanted the drawings have that handmade texture, and you can see that, that there is a texture.

So all the drawings that I could animate in one week, it took me three weeks to shade it.

And I realized after like two years, I realized that if I wanted to finish the film, like I have to hire another artist because I would be still doing the shading, honestly.

I wouldn't be here talking to you.

So I had to hire another artist to help me out with shading and I go to live drawing and there at the live drawing, I asked around if any artist is available for work and luckily, John Corner, one of the artists said the shading, he agreed to do the shading for the project so you can see here he's working and he also said very early on, he said, "I can't work for you full time because I have this other job."

And I said, "Well, you know, okay, but it's gonna take long, but okay, if you can give me three days."

He said, "Two days a week."

I'm like, "That's not enough, that's not enough."

And then, you know, pandemic happened and this other job fell apart and so then I got him full time.

(audience laughing) I mean, I'm not saying pandemic is good, right?

It's definitely not, I'm not wishing it again pandemic, but I want to say that sometimes out of lemons come lemonade, right, and so that was a lemonade.

So here you can see what happens.

This is one of my printouts from the background, right, and you see how I mark down the territory on top.

I cut down the top and I cut down the bottom because a photograph, the picture is a little bit too rectangular and I needed it wide screen because the cinema proportion is long and it's not square so I had to cut it down so I marked the territory where the action was gonna be.

Then I do a layout drawing, a sketch of a pillow, then I draw in a character who is lying down and lazing around and bossing his wife around.

And then I clean him up and I separate his head.

And because I am not a Disney, I cannot animate everything moving at all times as the characters are talking, I need to give, like be very conscious where the movement is.

And so I said, "Well, in this scene he's just lying down doing nothing and talking, so let me move only the head."

And for the head, depending on the scene, I would make, you know, three or five or seven heads for each sound like, ah, eh, e, or um, ooh, or you, and so I would make these sounds, the heads for the sounds and then I would put them in as a lip sync to lip sync.

And so then we scan these drawings, these drawings we scan digitally into Photoshop and we send them to a Latvian team, to team in Lavia and here we had to work through distance.

I was working from Brooklyn and they were in Lavia, so we Zoomed and we Skyped.

And here is Aneta, she's the leader of the coloring department, and Geriks is part of a compositing department.

And here Aneta is talking about how they do the coloring.

And Geriks here is talking how they do the compositing.

Here's the Latvian team, the color, it's not all the team, but majority of the team.

As you can see, Geriks is the only man because in Latvia, all the animators and all the animation people are women.

So that's a place, that's a country of women animators.

So the coloring, how does the coloring happen?

So in this room, these colorists come in and they color on Cintiq, all these characters and they are artists because, you know, you think the coloring would be simple, but they would have to give shading like for the shape, you know how like to give three dimensional form, you have to really understand the form of the human form so they were all really highly educated artists.

And so here you can see the, in a background producer and then one of the colorists, Vidika, and then me talking.

And so here is the coloring, this is how it looks.

This is uncolored drawings and here's colored drawings.

Is it better, right, when it's colored?

Yes, that's definitely much better.

Then the compositing.

And you know compositing?

Are you familiar with compositing?

It's like when the team puts together all these color drawings together with the backgrounds and then they have to make sure that the drawings look like they belong to these backgrounds.

And in the beginning we had two compositors, Gerik's in the back in the yellow shirt and Arturs.

But Arturs, very early on, he said, "I have a baby coming and you guys are not paying me enough and I have to do and find a serious job that pays me," and so he left.

And so then Geriks brought in his classmates because he was still in school and that's where we had a really thriving female team, you know, because it worked out really well.

And so here, what is compositor, what compositors are doing?

So for example, this scene, husband Sergei, played by a Cameron Monaghan, is lying in a foreground on a bed and Zelma brought him food to eat.

And then when Zelma starts talking, you switch the focus.

You see that?

And so that is what the compositors had to do, like they had to transform this transition and make sure that this movement, this camera movement looked natural.

Then you can see here Sergei, Zelma's husband, is standing in the door.

He's soon gonna walk out the door, but there is a shadow under his feet and there is a shadow on the door.

That was created by compositor because it wasn't there before.

And then of course when the door slams after Sergei, it has to be also put together.

So here's the cat who scrapes the wallpaper you'll see in the film.

And that's you, again, you can see the shadow under Zelma, shadow under the cat.

It wasn't there, it was created by compositor.

And then there is a different scenes, they're done in a different technique.

Here's a little storyboard and here's a cleanup layout drawing of Sergei showing his painting in art gallery and people are laughing at his paintings.

And so here, like this is cleaned up drawing.

And then we did the flat coloring, flat color.

And then we did the shadows, the colored shadows in a different layer.

And then we combined the shadows and the drawing together as one and so it looks a little more dimensional, and then here's the background color.

So that's a different technique.

So now Biology.

Biology was animated by another.

It had to be animated by another artist because I didn't want, because Biology is something we don't see and I was animating the parts that we see that we are aware, like, you know, the world that Zelma lives in, but the world that we don't see, the Biology that is constantly present had to be animated by another animator who had a different style and I couldn't find such an animator because it seemed very impossible because it had to be different, but it had to be complementary to my style.

And so here I created some crazy animatics, you know, with Biology and you can see they're horrible.

I mean, I'm just showing to you, I want you to be impressed and embarrassed for me, that's the idea.

And then I went to school, you know, there's Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

They have this every year in May, the show there alumni, people who graduate films, you know, and every year I go because I'm very interested in young, new people coming and what they ideas, what is like, it's interesting, and I saw this film there called "Parasite" and it was by created by Ya Jung Xi and I don't know, like there are some images here, aren't they amazing?

Look at this.

And it was not just an image, it was animated and it was so elaborately animated, and if you are animator, you know, she animated everything at once so it was really super animated and I thought it was like really, really well designed and very amazing film and I thought she could do Biology if she would agree, so I called her.

This is Ya Jung, and I said, "Ya Jung, I really would like you to work on my film."

And she said, "You know, it's very funny, but all the time when I was studying in Pratt, my teachers would tell me that you should meet Signe Baumane because you would like her work and now you're asking me to work for you."

She said, "Well, it was meant to be."

But she said, "Unfortunately, I have this other studio where I'm working and it's a commercial studio and they are paying me so well that I cannot work for you more than two days a week."

And I'm like, "That is going to take forever.

I don't know, but okay, whatever you can give me."

So we started working and one time we meet, the second time meet, and then the pandemic struck.

(audience laughing) And then two days after pandemic, she called me and she said, "You know that commercial studio I was working for?

They went bankrupt and now I can work for you full time."

(audience laughing) And now I was like, "Well, I think it was meant to be, right?"

(audience laughing) So we started to work, she worked for me full time and I remember how I was telling you about that paper excites me, right?

Like it's really exciting for me to work on paper.

So Ya Jung was working on a Wacom tablet this big, you know the smallest Wacom tablet?

- Yeah.

- Like this big, this big.

And I'm like, "Ya Jung, why are you working on a Wacom tablet?"

And she said, "Oh, I don't know, I don't like Cintiq."

I said, "You can afford Cintiq."

She said, "Yeah, I can afford, I bought it, but I didn't like it."

I said, "Well, then you can afford the bigger Wacom tablet."

"Yeah," she said, "I tried it, I don't like it."

She says, "As a child, I learned to draw with this tiny Wacom tablet and I cannot get excited animating on anything else.

Like when I draw on this small tablet, there's something that in my brain happens."

And I was like, "Well, I totally know what you're talking about."

You know, like that is kind of my like message to you guys and the girls that you have to work with what make feels right to you, like what excites you?

Sometimes people find like they search for the perfect software or perfect tool, and once they find it, they never make a film again.

They don't ever make a drawing again and it is because it doesn't excite them and I think the excitement, when the brain goes on fire, that's where we have to, you know, work with.

So we work with Ya Jung, and of course, so when we could meet after all these lockdowns, we got together in my studio and discussed the Biology and it was really amazing to work with Ya Jung because she really worked really, really hard and she made whatever my ideas were about Biology, she made them 100% better.

Now the post-production, do you know what is post-production?

As it says here, it's a film scoring Foley sound design as final sound mix.

And for me, a lot of things were clear, but not everything I knew before I entered this.

Do you know Storm Large?

She's a singer from a Oregon band called Pink Martini.

You know Pink Martini?

She sometimes sings with them and she was on "America Got Talent" and she sang our end credit song and I hope you stay for the film.

And so we did a post-production with our partner in Luxembourg and it was in a post-production studio called Philophon.

And I have to say, I never have worked with more professional studio ever before.

So here you can see this guy, his name is Christoph, and he came from Paris to Luxembourg to record Foleys.

And you can see how he is, has a lot of one shoe, like not a pair of shoe because he only needs one shoe, but you know how each surface makes it a different sound and each sole makes a different sound?

So before he would record any steps, he would ask me, what is the surface?

Where is it?

What's the mood?

And then he would choose a shoe.

Honestly, I never worked with a Foley artist who was like true artist.

Like he would like go in a screen and he would look at the screen on a movie and then he would just go like, "Oh, I know, I know, I know."

And then he runs through the pile of his garbage and he would be like, "No, no, this is not that."

And then runs and then he picks something else and then he said, "Oh, this is this, but it needs this one."

And it was just like, you know, absorbed, interested, and passionate about sound.

And that was like, I felt I was working with true artist.

You can see that this is his pile of garbage.

(audience laughing) - [Audience Member] Yeah.

- And it is really valuable to him.

When he, I saw him unpack when he arrived on Sunday night to Luxembourg, it was like his whole car was packed and he was taking all the boxes out gingerly because it was treasures.

And the whole studio, he filled with this garbage the whole studio.

You can see here all these like shoes.

It's just one shoe, not a pair.

It's like one shoe and on like, I mean, yeah, it looks like collection of garbage, but it's very important sound-making tools and he knew exactly, like he had to know exactly where each object was because when he went into like, you know, in a frenzy into the zone, that's the word zone, he would go in a zone and he would be like, "Oh yeah, I know this one, this object."

It's just like quite amazing to work with a person like that.

And here is Ken who was recording all the Foleys.

And here is our sound designer.

And as you can see, he didn't want his picture to be taken because his hobby is graffiti, (all laughing) so he couldn't have his picture being anywhere on social media or anywhere because, you know, like they wouldn't catch him, So he would, you know, after work, he would just dress up in the dark clothes and disappear and do stuff and then the next day he would by limping.

He said, "Oh, I was climbing over this wall and I fell on my knee and now I have to limp."

But, you know, everybody has their own whatever they want to do.

But, so anyway, so what does the sound designer do, right?

And so we already know that each, every character when it moves through the space has a sound and Foley artist just recorded that, everything like I touch my skirt, that is recorded, my steps, recorded.

I put something on a table, that's recorded.

that's all Foley that was done.

And then Pierre, his name is Pierre, sound designer, came and he, like you know how each room has a different room tone, like each room has something, like this has a echo, and I walk behind the stage and there's no echo.

It's like it's kind of dead sounding.

And then there is a open space.

And so he has, for every space, he had to create atmosphere, he had to create this thing that we believe that it's a real space and it has an element of mood, of feeling to it.

And then he created also like for Biology parts, he created the mood for Biology because it's a very mysterious, strange space where Biology lives, and so created that.

And so, and then other like special effects, he all put it on the film.

And here is the sound re-recording mixer.

And before this, I had never worked this re-recording mixer before and this is amazing, amazing, re-erecording mixer, Lo-i-cal-ing-yong.

And do you know what the recording mixer does?

Yeah, no, right, I didn't know either.

So you know how you see these speakers along the wall?

You see on each side there's a speaker and behind the screen there is speakers in a cinema to create a surround sound, to create surround like feeling that you are in a real environment of the film.

And re-recording mixer, he had, in our film we had dialogue, 30 actors and singers singing and talking and voiceovers, two voiceovers, two this and that, and then there were these 24 songs and then there all these atmospheres and then all these sound effects and little Foleys.

All that was more than 1,000 tracks, and if you put the tracks just like randomly on the film, it would be a mess, it'll be porridge of sound.

So he had to organize every sound.

He had to put, he said, "Well, this violin would go, would be sounding from that speaker.

And this (indistinct) would sound from that speaker.

And the voice would come from the center speaker."

And so he would assign to each speaker where the sound would come from.

And you know, when you realize that, like now when I watch movies, I just have a just amazing appreciation what the sound re-recording mixer does.

It is quite amazing.

And to be working with high professional like this is really quite something.

And yeah, like, you know, when you're going to hear the end credit song for the movie, I hope you will hear how each instrument is playing from a different place and the voice is coming from somewhere else and it has that feeling of live performance.

And so here he's working with 1,000 tracks.

And here is the Luxembourg team, the sound team, and me and Sturgis and our producer Raoul.

And here is "My Love Affair with Marriage," the poster for the film.

The film has been released.

The film has gone to about 110 film festivals around the world.

It has won 24, 25 awards.

And so I feel that in some ways it succeeded, you know, to people are interested, they want to see the film, they want to show the film, so I'm very excited about it, but we released the film two years ago and at this point I'm ready to move on, but I do really hope that you will come to see the film now that you saw how it was made because now with this knowledge of how the film was made, you will come entirely differently will see the film itself.

And I want to also say that indeed, at the end of the film, at the end of the, you know, before the Q&A, I will give away three drawings from the film, or even more, you know, five drawings from the film, and if you are a lucky audience member, you can have the drawing from the film and put it in your bathroom.

(audience laughing) And so on that note, I feel like I was supposed to say something else, but I do hope to see you at 7:30 at the film screening and thank you so much for coming and thank you, thank you.

(audience applauding) (audience cheering) Thank you.

(audience chattering) (audience chattering continues)