Lady Filmmakers Festival 2019 – UnderSee
An invasion of destructive black sludge intrudes on an idyllic world inhabited by mythic beings who find momentary salvation in the actions of an assiduous invertebrate clean-up crew who arrive to make things right.
Interview with Director/Producer Margie Kelk
Watch UnderSee here:
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
Lynne Slater and I had talked quite a while about environmental concerns in the oceans, and I had been playing around making strange sea creatures out of ceramic and Fimo. We decided to use the sculptures in a fantasy film dealing with the effects of pollution on an undersea community, fantasy because we did not feel we could create a truly realistic undersea world, nor did we want to deliver a depressing scientific treatise on a dying community. We created a quirky world suffering from the h effects of pollution, and the very quirkiness was to be the hook that would captivate our audiences. Once we could gain their interest, we could deliver our environmental concerns to them through animation.
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
You should watch this film because it will awaken your interest in environmental concerns as it entertains you. If we do not take action to protect our physical world, future generations may well lose the natural world we have been living in.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
Personally, I am very upset about human activities which continue to destroy our already fragile environment. Environmental issues are already a global concern; my personal concerns mesh with these.
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
This film has no script. It has simply evolved out of Lynne’s and my imaginations as we let the characters we had chosen for it “play.” We looked at the characters I had made, we decided to put them in an underwater environment, and we let them act as we thought they might. We had no storyboard and were happy just to let them play. They seemed to play out on their own.
What type of feedback have you received so far?
The feedback so far has been very positive. The film has made it into more than 40 festivals since its debut in September 2018...
Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
I have been delighted by the feedback this film has earned. Audiences find humour in the characters and seem to understand the basic premise of the film very quickly. They tell me how much they enjoyed the colour of the coral reef and its denizens—it is visually stunning—and they appreciated the difficulty of the stop-motion aspects Lynne and I tied into the creation of the film.
What are you looking to achieve by having your film more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com?
If my film were to be made more visible, then more people would receive the message Lynne and I are hoping to convey, and hopefully, more people would think about it and take some sort of action to save our environment.
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
I think every one of those people could help make an impact. I would take all of them!
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
It would be wonderful if the film spurred people to work on cleaning up the oceans and taking better care of the planet. The latter might by extension include joining the fight against climate change.
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
Such a key question might be: Is mother nature able to heal her own wounds to some extent? Or does she need human intervention to redress the wrongs humanity has been throwing her way?
Would you like to add anything else?
I think my answers have given enough information so far.
What other projects are the key creatives developing or working on now?
Lynne and I are currently working on a film which ties humans to the beauty that is Antarctica. The film shows older people isolated in their own concrete homes and compares them to penguins isolated yet living together on ice floes in Antarctica.
Interview: September 2019
We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series, music video, women's films, LGBTQIA+, POC, First Nations, scifi, supernatural, horror, world cinema. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
UnderSee
An invasion of destructive black sludge intrudes on an idyllic world inhabited by mythic beings who find momentary salvation in the actions of an assiduous invertebrate clean-up crew who arrive to make things right.
Length: 7:40
Director: Margie Kelk, Lynne Slater
Producer: Margie Kelk
Writer: Margie Kelk, Lynne Slater
About the writer, director and producer:
Toronto-based visual artist MARGIE KELK takes an exploratory and experimental approach as she appropriates and reconstructs visual fragments of ideas through diverse artistic media that includes ceramic sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, and animation. Her first animation, Substratae, has been screened in more than 60 film festivals and has won over 20 awards worldwide.
LYNNE SLATER Slater is a visual artist and animator based in Scarborough. Her stop-motion animated work UnderSee created with co-director Margie Kelk, with music by Alan Sondheim and Associates, has been screened internationally. It won Best Experimental Film in the Calcutta International Cult Film Festival (Kolkata, West Bengal, India) and it won an outstanding achievement award at the L’Age d’Or International Arthouse Film Festival (Jadavpur, Kolkata, India). It was an official selection in the Philip K. Dick Film Festival at the Orange County Museum of Art (Santa Ana, California), the Golden State Film Festival (Hollywood, California), SFFAF South Film and Arts Academy Festival (Rancagua, Chile) and the Toronto Short Film Festival (Toronto, Canada). UnderSee also won a Certificate of Achievement in the December 2018 Indie Short Fest and an award of Special Mention in the One-Reeler Short Film Competition, (both in Los Angeles, California).
Lynne assisted with animation, editing, compositing and effects for Substratae, directed by Margie Kelk, which has been screened internationally in over 50 film festivals, and she was technical director for Kate Wilson on Minute #7 of Ways of Something, Episode 3, curated and compiled by Lorna Mills. She is a graduate of Sheridan College International Summer School of Animation and also the University of Toronto (BSc in Psychology with a minor in Visual Studies) and The University of Waterloo (BASc). She studied Photo-Electric Arts and New Media at the Ontario College of Art and she studied scriptwriting with Howard Wiseman at the University of Toronto, Continuing Education. She also studied storyboarding, cartooning, life drawing, and anatomy at Studio M in Toronto. She is active in the Toronto animation community where she has served on the Board of the Toronto Animated Image Society in various capacities including President.
Looking for: distributors, film festival directors, buyers
Facebook: Margie Kelk
Twitter: @MargieKelk
Instagram: @mskelk
Hashtags used: #undersee
Website: www.margiekelk.com
Made in association with: Lynne Slater
Funders: Self-funded
Where can I watch it next and in the coming month? www.ladyfilmmakers.com + Skiptown Playhouse