5Q: Dustin Grella / PRAYERS FOR PEACE
Posted by CQ Central
Dustin Grella
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of PRAYERS FOR PEACE, from concept to financing.
I don’t know that it was ever a conscious decision. The film is entirely non-fiction, and I tried to keep as close to the facts as possible, so the story unfolded relatively naturally. I write every day, so after I walked past the ribbons, I went home and wrote about it, and while I was writing it I knew I was going to make a sound piece out of it. I was trying to make it feel a little like an Ira Glass narrative, very Americana. When I started looking for a topic to do the animation on I realized that I already had this sound piece finished and could simply animate on top of it. I don’t know that I ever sat down and said that I was going to make a film about my brother. I think this goes back to the question of what motivates me, when I said that the creative process is exciting, that I never really know what is going to happen next. I could be writing a letter one day that becomes a sound piece another day that becomes an animation the next, I don’t ever really know.
I think I might have just done that. The film’s creation was very organic. I just had to sit in the studio and do the work. As I mentioned before, the whole thing is a narrative of what actually transpired. I was walking home, I saw the ribbons and went home to write about my thoughts. After making the sound piece and deciding to turn it into an animation I decided that the shots should be long and slow so that the viewer has the opportunity to digest the story and not get hung up that it is entirely drawn with pastels on a sheet of slate. I storyboarded what I could, and pulled a lot of the sound and imagery off of Devin’s laptop, although the images for the end didn’t arrive until months later. I had some ideas of what I wanted to use, but this film’s creation was very organic. I just had to sit in the studio and do the work. I found the reference footage for the very last shot a few days before I used it. My Uncle Art gave me hours and hours of family VHS tapes to go through and I was getting sort of tired and drifting out and would have missed it entirely, but my girlfriend leaned over my shoulder and said, “Whoa!” Even though I did a lot of the work on the film, the film itself kept shifting forms and I really didn’t know what it was going to be about. It wasn’t until it was all over that I realized it wasn’t really my film at all, I was just there to put it together. Read more
Tags: 5Q, animation, Dustin Grella, non-fiction, Prayers for Peace, SHORTS, war.