New Directors: Parabella

What do a bouncing ball, a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur and the curve of a mathematical graph have in common? They’ve all inspired the name of new directing collective Parabella, aka Mikey Please and Dan Ojari. Though they officially only got together in July 2014, the animation duo had already been collaborating on projects before deciding that “it made sense to put a name on it”.

Contemporaries at the Wimbledon School of Art – Please was studying special effects; Ojari, set design – they first teamed up on an animated short, Crone, with fellow student Ben Gerlis (who went on to found set design company Stripeland). “The sense of being able to do so much more by working together obviously stuck with us,” says Please.

Next stop was the RCA for master’s degrees in animation, where each played a part in the other’s solo directorial successes: Please won a BAFTA for The Eagleman Stag, while Ojari’s short, Slow Derek, was screened at Sundance and Cannes. However, it wasn’t until 2014’s Marilyn Myller, a tale of creation, destruction and artistic struggle played out in painstakingly-sculpted polystyrene, that they collaboratively hit their stride. “It was a really intense production,” says Please, “but we developed an intuition for how to work together and the quality of the work really leapt forward as a result.”

Drink It All In for Twinings is Parabella’s first commercial project since signing to Blinkink in the UK, and illustrates the technical nous and ‘hefty dose of maths’ behind their apparently effortless flights of fancy. The stop-motion spot follows a wide-eyed ingénue whose first sip of tea transports her to a Disney-esque world of bluebirds, cutesy cobbled streets and epic sunrises, all made entirely from Twinings tea-tags. According to the directors, “Success hung on how that transition between the real [actress] and animated world was treated.”

As well as the small matter of constructing a set from 100,000 bits of coloured paper, the decision to shoot the majority of the film in-camera, with no CGI trickery to fall back on, required a “huge leap of faith”. The pair rebooted vintage filming techniques, such as the multi-plane camera pioneered by Disney in the 1930s, and used pixilation to animate the female character frame by frame. “Getting it to a level where the technique wasn’t so jittery that it was distracting, and wasn’t so fluid as to be mistaken for live-action was difficult and took weeks of rehearsal,” Please explains. “Thankfully [the end result] looked even better than we’d ever hoped – rewarding and relieving in equal amounts.”

Represented by Hornet for the US and Chez Eddy for France, Parabella have two long-form narrative projects in the pipeline – a young adult series and a family feature film. “It’s always uncertain waters when it comes to convincing other people of your brilliant ideas,” admits Please, “but we’re getting better at it.” SS