Filmmaker Leo Metcalf’s animation A Time Before is a mixed media short that seeks to explore repressed memories of a traumatic childhood. Told through a narrative that flickers between dreams and waking life, Metcalf immerses the viewer into the experience of his character Olly using a POV perspective. It’s a simple choice but one that has an intense, entrancing effect that gives the audience space to both experience and emphasise with Olly, and allows them to reflect on their own parental experiences. The film also boasts some incredible underwater sections that feature abstract, experimental imagery and swirling soundscapes that invoke a really interesting otherworldly texture. DN joined up with Metcalf, as A Time Before continues to traverse the festival circuit, to talk about his journey into animation, the personal introspection the film led him to enact, and the challenge of shooting underwater photography for the short’s most abstract moments.
A Time Before is such a fascinating, layered film, how have you been pitching it to people?
A Time Before is a twelve minute mixed media piece that explores the repercussions of childhood trauma through a deeply personal lens. Trapped between waking life and dreams, Olly delves into his earliest memories, navigating the fantastical dream worlds his sister created to shield them from family strife. It is a journey into the buried past that shaped who he is.
What was its creative genesis?
Having made several documentaries, I knew I wanted to make a film exploring consciousness, perception and memory that would examine how experiences of early childhood shape who we become later in life. Animation felt like the perfect medium to explore these themes because of the abstractness it provided which could help represent altered states, and by the fact simple figures could allow the viewer to identify with the characters. I applied to do a Masters in Animation at the Royal College of Art to learn the animation skills I needed.
Animation felt like the perfect medium to explore these themes because of the abstractness it provided which could help represent altered states.
Central to the film is my journey to confront my emotional stuntedness and to delve into its origins; however it took me more than a year of production to actually realise this! Both the film’s content and form were shaped by my own childhood in ways that I only came to understand retrospectively, which was fitting given my film examines how we are who we are based on things of our childhood we cannot well remember, let alone understand.
You said there that you applied to do a Masters to learn the necessary skills needed. What was your relationship to drawing and animation prior to the Masters?
I had not really drawn much since I was a 14 year old scribbling and doodling in class. I only picked up a pencil again a couple years ago. My drawings were therefore raw and naive, but the fact I was addressing childhood memories made me feel brave enough to use them in my RCA submission portfolio. I felt overwhelmed by colour, and so stuck to black and white with no shading. Looking back, I realise that many illustrations from the childhood books I loved were all simple but amazing black and white line art, so the bareness of the images of the characters was reminiscent of my childhood readings.
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In addition to animation, the film incorporates other visual styles, such as live action photography. What drew you to a mixed media approach?
Using a mixed media approach seemed natural, as my film depicts a first person perspective experience of dreams, imagination and multiple realities. The characters were animated in 2D using TVPaint and Callipeg. For the backgrounds, I mocked up the animated scenes in Cinema 4D to use as a reference to draw equirectangular projections with pen and ink on A3 paper that I could then scan, place in a 360 space and move the camera around in. I drew some of the river scenes more organically on paper and composited them in After Effects with live action reflection videos. One of the forest pond scenes was filmed, traced on paper and then scanned again and again as I added more paint and movement.
How did you capture those underwater scenes?
I have always been fascinated by how otherworldly being underwater feels and looks to us. Seeking to capture this, about fifteen years ago I started a hobby of filming underwater using my Canon 5D Mark II and a piece of kit I bought online which was basically a glorified plastic bag. I would always say a little prayer before I took it underwater! I filmed in streams, lakes, rivers, caves, beaches, anywhere I could get the camera underwater. From this footage I produced a series of videos I called Flections, and had lots of leftover footage to use.
Most of the underwater scenes are a collage of at least three, if not four or five videos.
Once I realised I was going to make the film as a first person POV, I sold my Canon 5D for a GoPro Fusion, and then an Insta360 One R. All the underwater shots are composites of: 360 underwater shots and Canon 5D shots of water below and reflections above, and in a few cases animated layers of painted water.
How much time did you spend in post on those underwater moments?
I spent a long time tweaking and feathering compositions to make them fit together. Most of the underwater scenes are a collage of at least three, if not four or five videos. This adds to their dreamlike ‘unreal’ appearance. Compositing was by far the most time consuming part of production. I loved doing it at the beginning, then it became a very finickity job repeatedly fixing things that looked wrong.
I wanted to ask about the POV perspective of the short. Was that a decision made to immerse the audience into your character’s narrative?
I decided to give the audience the POV of the young boy, to plunge them into the characters’ lived experience, rather than showing it from the outside. It felt natural to explore consciousness, perception, memory from a first person’s POV. An almost contradictory element to this experiential ‘immersive’ approach was my use of voice over. To me, the interplay between the disembodied voice and visuals gives a richness to the experience and gives the audience freedom to read into their juxtaposition.
During pre production I realised that many of my favourite films use a narrator’s voice, be they essay films; Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, dramas; Historias Extraordinarias by Mariano Llinás, or animations; It’s Such A Beautiful Day by Don Hertzfeldt and Hilary by Antony Hodgson and Lucia, Luis y El Lobo by Niles Atallah, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León. In film we are always told to ‘show and not tell’, and yet to me the counterplay between the voice, text and film can be where real magic lies. I see the greatest beauty in cinema when I don’t know why a work has made me feel the way it did, and a mix of image and voice often allows this.
In film we are always told to ‘show and not tell’, and yet to me the counterplay between the voice, text and film can be where real magic lies.
As long as the film immerses the audience in a sensual and emotionally narrative experience that carries them along, the voice over then has the freedom to add another layer to the experience. It is then not a deal breaker if the audience misses any plot points conveyed by the narrator’s voice. It’s almost as if the voice’s role is as much to be part of the atmosphere and mood as to help tell the story. I also loved how such an approach makes repeated viewings such an enjoyable experience, as different things can come to light. I am not someone who rewatches films much, except in the cases of these layered constructions.
The film is very much about some prickly family dynamics and their long term effects. Bit of a tricky question, but how much of what you’ve told is personal and how much is conceived to tell the story?
My film presents a family where the main character and his elder sister are united by the need to defend themselves from the emotional and physical violence of their father. And yet I need to point out that my father is actually a very kind and gentle man! The violence of the father was a narrative shortcut that I came upon very early in the process, seeking to add conflict; but this left me worried that my film was not personal: that I was trying to write about things that I had no experience of.
I came to realise that I was who I was based on things that I would never be able to properly remember, let alone understand.
At this point, Covid had hit and I had started online therapy, both to try to unpack the emotional hang ups I had, but also to help me take onboard my mother’s ongoing battle with cancer. A year and a half into production, well after the script was finalised, during production and therapy I came to realise that I was who I was based on things that I would never be able to properly remember, let alone understand. I also realised that my film, while not factually personal, had become very emotionally personal.
Underwater imagery has a long cinematic lineage of representing forms of transformation too so it feels like a natural fit.
The dreams and underwater dreaming were representative of my retreating from emotional reality, and how much my subconscious was murky and unavailable to me; while the last mirror scene clearly represented how I could not sit and engage with sad emotions when they ran too deep. It was almost as if my conscious mind had been working on the form and aesthetic, while my subconscious was actually doing the harder job of pinpointing the subject matter and emotional core. During the production of the film my mother passed away. This made me reflect all the more on grief and the forms memory can take. What is left in our minds after we lose someone? I therefore incorporated a participatory element in the film, inviting audiences to contemplate the nature of their memories of their parents, and what they are, or will, ultimately be left with once they pass away.
What’s the plan for your filmmaking going forward?
I am currently enamoured by Ursula K. Le Guin books and how she addresses big social issues such as identity, gender, inequality and exploitation while telling captivating human stories. Inspired by her writings I’m working on a short sci-fi film exploring a dystopic future where human touch has disappeared. However, I feel I have not quite finished wrestling with my subconscious and the world of A Time Before and The Everything Move, my first year film at the RCA, and feel I may end up making a third film from that universe at some point. Finally, I am currently finishing on an interactive VR version of A Time Before, however more on that when it is released, hopefully in a couple of months!
