Violette
"All My Life"
We wanted to create a love story with puppets, and tried to figure out many ways to make this happen on a limited budget. The biggest difficulty was going to be with the "locations." It'd be too costly/time consuming for us to build these mini worlds. Close friend and collaborator Parin Sarasin brought up the idea of filming in front of our TV. Rear projection!
I'd walk around the neighborhood looking for locations for our script, like the pizza place, coffee shop, and park (didn't make the cut). I'd ask if I could film the location for about 10 minutes, then we'd come back and loop that footage onto the TV. I also did this during a trip to Paris (we filmed this slowly over a month, scene by scene when we would have time).
In front of the TV, we constructed foreground elements to match the backgrounds and simply filmed. When we had a scene that I couldn't find a background for, we'd purchase a stock photo or video clip and play that.