Perfectly Quayesque, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is a mix of live-action and stop-motion animation. This dark fairy tale is the Brothers’ first foray into live action since 1995. All images courtesy of Illumination Films.

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes marks the second full-length feature from the Brothers Quay (Stephen and Timothy) and, as with everything they do, is thus guaranteed attention on a worldwide scale. Devotées of the Czech animation legend Jan Svankmajer, they have reinterpreted the tradition of European stop-motion animation for a wider audience while still remaining faithful to the original concepts and moods of its East European legacy.

Piano Tuner, exec produced by Terry Gilliam, is a mix of live-action and stop-motion animation, and is their first foray into live action since 1995’s Institute Benjamenta. An Anglo-German production scheduled for a U.K. release in November, the film is a suitably Quayesque and dark fairytale. A famous 19th century opera singer is mysteriously killed the night before her final performance, and is then transported by a magician to a bizarre half-life world, where he has constructed an orchestra from machines (all animated by the Brothers) in the hope of turning her into a mechanical nightingale. There she comes across the piano tuner, a blind hero, who strongly resembles the diva’s dead husband and resolves to save her and return her to the real world.

Live action was composited inside miniature sets and stop-motion work was composited inside live action. Not surprisingly, a Brothers Quay film always represents a particular challenge when it comes to post-production.

“We did all of the 82 major visual effects on this movie and a total of 300 shots overall,” says Frank Hellman, digital intermediate supervisor at German vfx specialists Optical Art. “The major shots included a water spout/tornado in a cavern that was done as a 2.5D effect, people drowning in the ocean, where the water was added in compositing. Keeping in mind too that this was shot entirely on stage, there were a lot of set extensions. Also we had the stop-motion shots in the film that needed deflickering and a lot of motion-effects, like extreme slow-mos.”

The Foundry wrote a custom diffusion spark plug-in to run seamlessly with Optical Art’s Baselight grading system from FilmLight, which saved four weeks of compositing time.

The deflickering was a particular challenge. During the pre-production phase, the Brothers Quay decided to use a Nikon D100 digital camera for the stop-motion sequences. The problem is that most digital cameras aren’t really designed for that kind of repetitive work and tend to give slightly different exposures. Usually this isn’t a problem, but run those digitally photographed sequences at film speed and you get a slight, but very annoying flicker. Not too much of a challenge to deal with until you look at the numbers: 60,000 frames at 4K resolution. That’s a lot of processing.

Piano Tuner was shot on HDCAM using a Sony F900. As a result, the resolution was too sharp for the required surreal atmosphere of this strange love story.

“There was quite a lot of compositing going on, either our live-action material into their pictures or their material into ours,” explains cinematograher Nic Knowland. “We shot quite a lot against greenscreen and Optical Arts understandably didn’t want to have diffusion on that, but one of the whole things about the twins’ look is that it’s quite heavily diffused. They shoot through lots of dirty glass and that sort of stuff. So…when we were doing all live action we used the equivalent of a number one pro mist, and when we were shooting greenscreen or bluescreen we didn’t use any. The agreement was that we would add two doses to the clean material, one dose to the not [so] clean material and it would all come out looking the same. We did suffer quite a lot for that decision.”