Short of the Week

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Documentary Pascal Floerks

BÄR

A grandfather's life is recounted in this deeply personal tale that sees filmmaker Pascal Floerks' mysterious family member reimagined as a Bear.

Play
Documentary Pascal Floerks

BÄR

A grandfather's life is recounted in this deeply personal tale that sees filmmaker Pascal Floerks' mysterious family member reimagined as a Bear.

BÄR

Directed By Pascal Floerks
Produced By Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg
Made In Germany

A grandfather’s life fondly recounted through the warmth of family photos, played as slideshow, might not exactly sound like the innovative storytelling we strive to feature on Short of the Week, but we’ve learnt to always expect the unexpected from students of the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg school. Replacing his grandfather with the looming figure of a bear, with Bär filmmaker Pascal Floerks has created a surprisingly stirring film that enthralls with its narrative orbiting around a mysterious family member and dazzles with the surprising depth of its craft.

At first glimpse, Bär might not look like the most technically complex film. In fact, you’d even be forgiven for assuming that the photographs used throughout Floerks’ film were created with a simple cut and paste job in Photoshop. That however would be doing a huge disservice to the filmmaker, who quickly realised that by using existing photos he wouldn’t be able to control the bear’s position and went to great lengths to ensure the aesthetic of his film was exactly as he wanted – as he explains in this interview:

“From the technical side, I started creating a ZBrush model of a bear, made a riggable, retopologized version of it, created a basic rig in Maya so I could pose him for the different photos. Fur was a good adventure as I had never done a fur project before. I tried different solutions but ended up using yeti fur for Maya, which was a great choice. After lots of grooming and combing and texturing and shading, matching the lights of the photos, I rendered the bear in Arnold for Maya. This gave great quality in a short amount of rendering time. Final compositing was done in Nuke and sometimes Photoshop”.

“The final step was to put all the photos on film slides, project it onto a nice canvas and film the slide show. Though I tried going all digital for this, I found that going the analog way gave a much more satisfying result. All filming had to go through one last step of editing. Combined with the sounds and music of Christian Heck, the film finally came together”.

Like the grandfather in Bär, my own was a mysterious figure who fought in WW2 and I think it’s the strange tenderness and relatability of Floerks’ film that makes it such an endearing watch. On paper, it feels like a ridiculous concept that wouldn’t work when brought to life, but in reality the inclusion of the bear as this friendly, huggable but somewhat unpredictable character feels like perfect casting.