While David Lowery was working on pickups for “Peter Pan & Wendy,” nearing the finish line of the massive film he had been working on for five years, he was sent the script for a short film written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jack Thorne. based on Rocky, the little owl, who was rescued from the Rockefeller Christmas tree in 2020.
“I make so many choices based on random whims in my life and I just love New York in the winter,” Lowery said in an interview with IndieWire. “And then there was a line in the script that said, ‘This chase scene should feel like ‘The French Connection,’ but with pigeons.’ Those two things grabbed me.”
But above all, the original appeal of “An Almost Christmas Story” was making a short film, which for Lowery felt like a breath of fresh air and a chance to refocus his energies after making the massive Disney film. The idea was to shoot it as a live-action briefly over the Christmas period, giving Lowery most of 2022 to rewrite, tinker and prepare the material.
“By the time we reached fall 2022 and started putting together budgets, it became clear that this would have been prohibitively expensive in live action and probably as much, if not more, than most of my feature films, even if it was a short film,” Lowery said, “and so at that point I started moving toward some form of animation.”
The project evolved in some interesting ways. During this time, Lowery gained an education and appreciation for what is possible with modern computer-generated animation while working with creative design supervisor Nicholas Ashe Bateman, the founder of Maere Studios. In many ways, Lowery is a filmmaker whose heart beats analog, and whose love of stop-motion and hand-drawn animation drove the process.
“I think we’re now at a precipice technologically where an artist can leave their fingerprints, so to speak, on a digital work in a way that animators couldn’t when CG first became a medium,” Lowery says. “Because initially, like all early Pixar films, you are dealing with very anodyne surfaces, because the technology can only reflect a limited amount of light onto the texture.”
A cardboard world
When the film switched to animation, Lowery quickly realized that hand-drawn and stop-motion animation would take too long. He wanted a handmade feel and a world where New York City felt like it was a series of miniature models. While playing with what was possible with Bateman using CG, Lowery drew inspiration from the arts and crafts projects of his childhood.
“[I wanted to] Making New York look more like a miniature, and then I thought I was a little kid building cardboard cities in the basement all the time,” Lowery said. “When I was growing up, we had a box that we put the excess cardboard in because we used it for crafts all the time. So I have a deep love for cardboard, and especially the texture of corrugated cardboard. And I just thought, what if we just make New York and everything out of cardboard, and that will determine the aesthetic of everything else, because everything else has to fit into that world and feel like it’s part of it.
Although cardboard would be the essential building block, everything that appears on screen in “An Almost Christmas Story” looks as if it were made from material you would have on hand in a large arts and crafts pantry.
“If you look at the Christmas trees, all the pine needles are little coffee stirrers or bows,” Lowery said. “They all come from things you would collect as a kid to build things.”
Puppetry and a stop-motion feel
Lowery has long dreamed of working with puppets, and initially the concept for “An Almost Christmas Story” was that all the main characters would be puppets, which would then be photographed and assembled into the cardboard CG environment.
“We did some nice testing, but it didn’t turn out exactly what I wanted,” Lowery said. “And I realized that I really liked having the flexibility that CG gives us. I love stop-motion, but especially in our time frame, when we were trying to get this film ready for Christmas, I thought, ‘we have to stay in a digital world.’
S for the characters’ movement, Lowery used motion capture as a basis to start, but then to create a stop-motion feel, characters ended up being animated on twos instead of ones. He explained, “Movies run at 24 frames per second, and when you animate on those movies, you make a small adjustment every 24 frames, but if you wait for two frames, you’re allowing the same segment of movies. movement exists for two frames. So you actually only do twelve movement sequences per 24 frames, which gives the stop-motion feeling.”
Creating texture and painted backgrounds
That stop-motion feeling got Lowery halfway through his first vision. The other important aspect was the feeling that the materials were real and tangible.
“I just want to have that extremely believable tactile texture for any kind of digital object in any of my films,” Lowery said. “And that we have gone to great lengths in everything [in the frame]. I was able to really delve into, no pun intended, my love of textures.
It’s here that Lowery became the biggest convert to CG animation, leaning on animators like the art department to fill the frame with tangible detail in his live-action films.
“Before, you could only render so much, so it was much harder to make CG feel handmade,” says Lowery. “Technology has now advanced so far that you can do whatever you want with CG. I see that changing left and right. The ‘Spider-Verse’ movies, those movies push the medium forward because they take all the things we’ve learned about CG and 2D animation, any type of animation, and use it to combine it into what I perceive with my look like a new shape. This is like a moment of great change in media, using CG in a whole new way.”
Lowery cites the backdrops of the forest and New York City as a good example. He wanted it to look and feel like matte paintings, with the skies appearing hand-painted. And to some extent they were. Bateman and his team went in to draw them, using only digital tools to indicate the brushstrokes and texture of paint on canvas.
Theatrical lighting
“An Almost Christmas Story” allowed Lowery to tap into his love of theatrical lighting, and having two cinematographers, David A. Ross and Z. Scott Schaefer, with vast experience in CG lighting was crucial.
“David and Zach have come up with a kind of method for lighting CG environments that is very holistic,” Lowery said. “It’s much more like lighting an entire city than lighting a scene. In this case, because the city was miniature and each city had a little light in each window, it would be more like we put a lamp in a cardboard box and let that one lamp shine through.
Lowery leaned so heavily into the conceit of theatrical lighting that he tapped his hand into the opening of the film. When you watch the owls, Moon (Cary Christopher) and Papa Owel (Jim Gaffigan), fly through the forest at night, the moon itself is a spotlight.
“I thought, what if instead of a moon we just had a hole in the sky with a Mole Richardson light behind it, so the moonlight can follow the characters like a spotlight,” Lowery said. “If you look closely, you can even see a small operator directing the light as it rotates.”
John C. Reilly, melancholy and music
Producer Alfonso Cuarón encouraged Lowery to rewrite the script and make it his own. His biggest addition would be adding a New York City street performer (John C. Reilly) – a role that grew with each new version of the film, evolving to include the short’s narrator and the Greek choir playing several Christmas carols in the spirit of Burl Ives in “Frosty the Snowman” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Reilly’s folksinger turns to the audience and asks, “What makes a story a Christmas story?” It’s a question Lowery would answer for himself while making the film: a bittersweet melancholy, mostly rooted in music.
“Vince Guaraldi’s music from ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ is Christmas to me, it’s so melancholic and so bittersweet,” Lowery said. “And it has the same tonality [as] the scene in the church with the neighbor in the original ‘Home Alone’, but even in ‘Christmas Vacation’, the scene where Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) is in the attic watching all the home movies, there is a kind of bittersweet melancholy that All Christmas Stories seem to somehow encompass something.”
Casting Reilly and his story would be the final piece of the puzzle. The night before the taping, Lowery and the actor stayed awake to write the dialogue.
“It was just me and John throwing ideas back and forth about what this character could say and how he could frame the story,” Lowery said. “You know, when I look at it now, I understand that the whole process is incredibly organic, but of course it’s also the thing that appeals to me the most of all the things in this film: someone telling a story and music to tell their stories to support.”
“An Almost Christmas Story” is now streaming on Disney+ after qualifying to compete for the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.