JUST ONE GUY AND A PENCIL
DiLiberto went to great pains in creating animated feature
Nick DiLiberto probably wouldn’t think of it this way, but the animator and filmmaker has suffered greatly for his art. We’re talking real, demonstrable pain.
The Hamilton, Ont. native gave himself four years to finish Nova Seed, his hour-long animated feature about a lion-man hybrid pitted against the evil Dr. Mindskull in a post-apocalyptic future.
It required him to work every day. Soon his fingers became cramped and blistered. He put band-aids on them. When that wasn’t enough, he began working with gloves. When that wasn’t enough, he put on a second pair of gloves. When that wasn’t enough, he wrapped his fingers in gauze and put the gloves on top.
“It’s like getting ready for a boxing fight,” says DiLiberto, in an interview from his home in Japan.
“I’d wrap myself up in the morning and I was ready to go. The funny thing is, I can’t even write a grocery list without that glove on now. My hand needs that protection now.”
It was partly due to a deal he made with his Japanese wife, whom he met in Edmonton while working at the video-game developer BioWare.
When they moved to her native Japan, he gave himself four years to make a feature film. That’s how long it takes the major studios to make animated blockbusters, so DiLiberto figured there was no way his one-man project could get done sooner. At the same time, his marital harmony would be greatly helped by giving himself a firm deadline and sticking to it.
“I’m married, and you can’t say to your wife ‘I’m going to get it done in 50 years,’ ” he says. “You have to bring it to reality and this was the way to do that. ... But in that thinking, when my hand started to get blisters and stuff, you would normally take a break, but I couldn’t afford it.”
Not only was DiLiberto working on his own, he was creating the entire project in the very labourintensive, 2-D format. While the 34-year-old filmmaker’s working life in Edmonton involved computers, he was drawn to this old-school format. So it meant hand-drawing 60,000 frames before digitally colouring them. He needed the full four years.
Along with his friends and family, he also did the voice acting for the film, discovering the rasp of the demented Dr. Mindskull when he was suffering from both pneumonia and bronchitis during a trip back to Canada. He had completely lost his voice, but taking a shower loosened things up a bit and he suddenly discovered his inner Mindskull.
“I had to literally stop the shower, go record some lines until I lost my voice, go back in the shower for 10 minutes and get the voice to come back,” he says with a laugh. “That’s how I recorded all his lines.”
The hard work has paid off. Nova Seed is a wildly imaginative 64-minute animated film that places viewers in a dark wasteland filled with fascinating creatures and non-stop action.
Nac, the lion-man hero, is a gladiator type who’s enlisted to save the world from Dr. Mindskull, who is looking to gain world domination by harnessing the power of a mysterious being.
The film has been doing well on the festival circuit and opens Calgary’s GIRAF Festival of Independent Animation on Thursday at the Globe Cinema.
While significantly darker than the television cartoons he grew up with, such as Masters of the Universe and G.I. Joe., that influence creeps into the work.
“Even when I was a kid, I always drew my own stuff,” he said. “I love He-Man and I love ThunderCats and stuff. But I never drew HeMan, I would draw my own character. You’d see those monsters and you’d draw your own monsters.
“But obviously I watched those types of cartoons when I was a kid over Bambi. But when I was making the film, I wasn’t trying to imitate anything like that. The influences come through because that stuff is who I am.
“I love that stuff, I still do. I watch He-Man now and I still get chills when he says ‘I have the power!’ I can see it through the eyes I had as a kid.”
DiLiberto is working on a followup, although he says it will be dependent on the success of Nova Seed, because he can’t afford to work on a new film full-time without an income.
It will also be hand-drawn and will have a similar feel.
“Doing this film in that art style, you just couldn’t do it any other way,” he says.
“Part of it is the enjoyment of it. Because it’s so much work and if I didn’t enjoy it the way that I do, I wouldn’t be able to get it finished.”