You awaken alone in a dark room, but you sense the presence of something larger. This being snatches you up, stretches your body, and twists you into shape. Once you’ve gained your balance, the being walks away and then you feel something else entirely. Other figures–the same size and shape as you–flank either side, but they are deformed, bloody, and broken. What happened to them? How can we get away? In Matteo Burani’s incredibe animated short film, Playing God, we recognize beauty and horror all squished together as one.
**We have linked Playing God below. Watch the film and then scroll back up to read our conversation.
Some might be frightened by the images Burani and his animator, Arianna Gheller, conjure, but there is a strange, relatable quality to the creation being born before our very eyes. Burani insists that he wasn’t making a commentary on anything holy but rather this very specific creative process.
“This has been such a big journey for us,” Burani says. “We say that it took seven years to make this short film, and sometimes it’s better to say that five of that was learning how to produce it and how to find money to fund it. It took about two years to animate it and work in post-production. We wanted to show what the medium could do, and the spark really came from the idea of a creator and his creation. We didn’t want to talk about religion as much as a creator like a sculptor.
Everything started in 2017, and I had this grotesque idea when we were working for a stop-motion studio. I was curious about using the medium in a different way. One of my favorite artists was Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss-French-Italian sculptor from the ’60s. His main way to make art was based on existentialist thougt, so he was never happy about what the result was. I saw an interview with him as a young man where someone kept asking him how did he get so good at sculpting and he replied that he wasn’t good every time. He considered himself a failure. That was a big inspiration for us, but then it evolved to focus the attention away from the idea of the creator but more about the consequences of the creation. Imagine this world composed of failed scuptures–like a little society.”
One of the most impressive visual elements is seeing the texture between the creator’s hands and the skin of the creation he’s making. The creation’s eyes are so expressive as they transmit feelings of worry and fear, and you wonder if he is making somethin in his own image.
“Part of the goal was to achieve this dualism between the real human skin that was actually my hand,” he says. “Making this pixelation was kind of this medieval torture, in some ways. Try to imagine staying still hour after hour for what felt like a month. That dualism between the real flesh is because it’s real flesh–it’s not CGI. You see the crumble of the skin, the nerves, and all the little imperfections on the skin. Some people talk about body horror, but I never thought of it like that.”
“It was difficult for me to figure out how to shape this clay, because it gets dry really, really fast,” Gheller says. “You need to smooth it out with a brush, so we would choose a specific day to maintain the details like on the character’s face. It was a long process to study the techniques to mold it and then mix them together. We wanted the colors to even have a sense of living flesh, and that terracotta is a link even with the primordial clay–the meat of the golem that was created by the clay. So it’s all connected with the sense of the story too.”
“We used this specific, brownish terracotta here,” Burani adds.
“We wanted this palette to feel really warm,” Gheller says. “I am glad that people are saying that they connect with the character, because I was using a mirror during the animation. Before sculpting every single frame, I was acting in a mirror and then I would mold all the muscles and details.”
You cannot begin to wonder how each of these other people met their broken fate. These artists reveal that they took the time to create a story for everyone that we see on screen.
“At the beginning, we wanted to show this kind of monstrosity, but we wanted to create something more artistic and aesthetically correct,” Burani says. “We didn’t set out to make monsters exactly, but something different. The direction we took isn’t exactly akin to zombie, but we played a lot with the personality with each one to try and imagine what happened to every one of those creations. Maybe they had all fallen in different ways. One might have broken his leg or one might have toppled backwards and hit the backof his head.”
“They are like my friends, in a way,” Gheller says. “I spent so much time with them that I really felt like I knew them in the end. I was conscious of all of their behavior. For example, there is one with these big eyes and a long mouth and a special nose. I made him move slowly and a little dumb, because I imagined how his body crashed on the tabletop.”
“We also follow this kind of wave,” Burani says. “It’s important that there is a moment when the main character discovers to be alive in this kind of hell. He’s afaid about this creature, so you are in the horrific moment with him. The next goal was then for him to feel different waves of feelings and emotions with the monsters.”
I almost feel bad calling them monstrous. You realize why you are connecting with each of these unfortunate souls, and it’s because they have all been through this before. What would happen if this happened to you? My favorite moments come with our creation’s struggle to set himself free. We can almost hear the flesh being ripped up off the floor, his spit stretching between his top and bottom teeth.
“We wanted to include even this moisture effect with his eyes ans saliva, and we studied a lot on how to manipulate the materials to get this effect, ” Gheller says. “For the saliva, I used a mx of glue, and I only had three minutes to cut the material, because it would get really dry really fast. That shot wasn’t so easy for that, because I had to do the puppet animation, the clay animation of his face, and then handle this material that was quickly drying. I am really proud of that moment.”
