 |
| Beautiful Men |
There's always a public appetite for stop motion animation, the more detailed the better, so it's no surprise that Nicolas Keppens' diligently produced short film Beautiful Men has found its way onto this year's Oscar shortlist. What's really special about it, however, is the amount of depth it layers into a form more often used for light-hearted, quirky little tales. There's certainly comedy in this sympathetic tale of three Belgian brothers who go to Turkey to get hair transplants, but there's a lot more besides.
 |
| Beautiful Men |
I met Keppens, who is a little bit short on hair himself but a lot less insecure about it, at an animation showcase event where he summed up the structure of the film.
“Beautiful Men is a story about three balding brothers going to Istanbul to get a hair transplant, but due to the weather conditions and a bad communication with the hospital, they are in trouble. The first time I wanted to make something about this subject was when I was in Istanbul myself for work. It was the coordinator of this video company I worked for that organized the whole travel, so I didn't know that we were in a hotel that worked together with this kind of clinic.
“We arrived late at night. The first day, in the morning, my colleagues and I arrived at breakfast. My colleague has dreadlocks, another colleague has long hair – you know, they’re art studio people. I had more hair then. And we arrived in a room full of bald men. Then we understood that it was a hotel working together with this kind of clinic, and it was such a touching thing to see because although the room was filled with men, it was not at all the image society makes about men. It was something very fragile, like the imagery we have. I wanted to do something with it because my brother and I are balding too, and I thought it was an interesting subject to tell us something about brotherhood and masculinity, in a way.
 |
| Beautiful Men |
“In the beginning we got production funding to make a 2D film, and then I rewrote the story a little bit with a friend of mine, Angelo Tessas. When we wrote it together, it became more and more concerned about loneliness and tactility. Of course, loneliness and fragility are very doable and beautiful in animation too, but to me it was easier to be effective with it when you have a puppet being alone in a set, so that's why we chose in the end to make it a stop motion animation. But then it was way more expensive.
“In the initial script we had to build streets in Istanbul, so it wasn't possible at all. And it was the Covid period, so I wasn't able to travel to Istanbul to get back to what the neighbourhoods I wanted to show looked like. So then came the idea of the fog, which is also a story element to show or to help the men that are not able to decide for themselves during the story. So the most difficult thing was like looking for a way to proceed without having the money to portray it again.”
I tell him that the fog struck me as one of those things that can be very hard to get right in animation – the density of it and the way it moves.
 |
| Beautiful Men |
“It was important to me that the effects were as much as possible done on set,” he says. “I thought a lot about it before but in the end it was the easiest trick imaginable. We built a white background (infinity background, so bending from the floor to the wall without a corner). After placing everything we added very soft light and in post just added a small amount of fog in a digital overlay and reduced the contrasts as much as possible. So it was an easy trick in the end. For the hotel (fire escape) we used real fog machines and made it work in the edit.”
He’s very excited to have a shot at the Oscars, and together with actor Peter De Graef, who plays Koen in the film, he has been practising by riding to the local video store in a limousine and drinking extra champagne. On the 17th, he’ll find out whether or not all this training was worthwhile.
