2 Finnish Short Films 2011

Making of
The Death of an Insect
Hannes Vartiainen and Pekka Veikkolainen’s previous film, Hanasaari A,
was an experimental documentary about the demolition of a power plant
and it has enchanted audiences throughout the world. Now Hannes and
Pekka explore new territory in The Death of an Insect, their latest film,
which combines a number of animation techniques in a unique way.
We started developing a film with dead insects already in 2006. The
production started in January 2010 and during the spring we had to come
up with quite special technical solutions for shooting these tiny characters.
Building the 360° dance choreographies of real world insects started in 2006 with a
white paper and an upside trash can. Later we glued markers around an ancient vinyl
player to get shots at precise intervals, but for the production phase we set up a cosmic
telescope motor and a timelapse camera to automate the process and get flawless loops
of rotating insects.
Pohjankonna Oy
Most of the insects featured in the film
were gathered from the forgotten corners
of the city of Helsinki: Between window
panels, dusty attics and cobwebs. Some of
them come from old butterfly collections
(the earliest samples are from the 1960s).
The Giant Prickly Stick Insect with his
tragic solo performance died in the 1990s
of natural causes. After he passed away,
the carcas was preserved and now 20 years
later found to star in the film.
Pohjankonna Oy
A simple reflective floor surface was built in a 3D program, and in order to populate it
with dancing white formations of bugs, a couple of different techniques had to be used.
To get clean silhouettes of wasps, butterflies and other bugs, they were shot against a
light table which produced beautiful results maintaining wing transparencies. Some bugs
were really too tiny for any of our lenses, so they were sacrificed by crushing them flat
inside a slide frame and scanned with high precision. Those scans and silhouette photos
were then cleaned up and used as textures for the 3D dance.
The spider in the end shot is a result of such scan. A tiny spider crushed flat, then rebuilt
from pieces to be animated for the film.
From the early drafts of the script we
were sure that in order to have complete
control over depicting tiny dead bugs we
would have to be able to look inside them,
or even be inside them if we so felt like. It
turned out that around the world there are
a few X-ray scanners for hire, that can scan
fossils down to the size of a grain of sand.
In February 2010 we paid a visit to the university of Ghent in Belgium. Their research
team at the Centre for X-ray Tomography has built an X-ray scanner, which can create 3D
models by combining hundreds of X-ray images taken of an object.
From about one hundred flies we chose three with the most interesting death poses,
and mailed them over to Belgium along with some beetles and a hawkmoth. The data
came back a while later and Janne Pulkkinen helped us visualize the see-through insect
carcasses through his self-built 3D engine.
The black and white shots are the result of this work, and in one of the aerial shots you
can see the 3D fly hanging over the city, glowing bright yellow.
Pohjankonna Oy
Janne Pulkkinen, Pekka Veikkolainen, Hannes Vartiainen Pohjankonna Oy Pohjankonna Oy
In order to take the insects out to the streets, to have them race on the Baltic sea and dance on the ice, we had a 2 hour flight with a tiny Cessna plane, sunset time, over Helsinki.
These shots were then tracked for the 3D implementation of dancing bugs.
Death of An Insect, page 9
Finnish Short Films 2011 7