When people think of stop-motion animation, they often imagine creators as meticulous perfectionists who painstakingly adjust each frame, obsessing over the smallest details. And while the duo behind The girl who cried pearls are undeniably precise and detailed, the process of making this film revealed something much more fun: the willingness to accept the unexpected.
By leaving room for experimentation and spontaneity, Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski discovered that mistakes transformed the creative process. In his own words: “Indeterminacy, sometimes called a happy accident, was for us an invisible and reliable collaborator.”
These are some of the delightful accidents that helped shape the soul of the film.
worn look
During the construction of the set, inspired by Montreal at the beginning of the 20th century, misfortune influenced the appearance of the ruined house. The filmmakers explained: “The original model of the house was left to dry outside our studio. An unexpected storm hit and when we returned, the prop was warped. But it actually looked much better that way, so we incorporated the warps into the final model.”
RANDOM FINDINGS AND RECYCLING MINDSETS
The creators of The girl who cried pearls he adopted a scavenger mentality, transforming discarded objects into fixed materials. Steel bristles shed from street cleaning trucks became structural supports, while rain-soaked cardboard, rotting wood, and empty pill bottles found new life in the miniature world they built. Small toys and watches from a dollhouse were used to fill the interior of a pawn shop, and items from previous films were also recycled. Eagle-eyed spectators could see the turntable from Lady Tutli-Putli and the piano of the VR experience Gym. This inventive reuse added texture and authenticity to the set’s visual language.
The filmmakers developed a novel painting technique for the film, using trash bags to create random, irregular patterns on surfaces. This simple and quick technique was essential to give the decoration an aged and worn look.
POOR COVID COMMUNICATION
During the first weeks of the COVID lockdown, Chris and Maciek were forced to build puppets separately in their homes (one sculpting the heads, the other the bodies); They only met occasionally (“in some alley, two meters apart”) to check on each other’s progress. A confusion of scales made the heads much larger than the bodies. This should have been a disaster and taken weeks of work, but the filmmakers decided to accept the mistake and the oversized heads became part of the film’s aesthetic.
BUDGET LIMITATIONS
For the first time in their careers, the filmmakers wrote a story with extensive dialogue and narration. but the movie bThe budget only allowed three minutes of oral animation, for a 16-minute story. There seemed to be no other solution than to rewrite history or give up. But then they remembered that for most of the long history of puppets, puppets emoted without moving their mouths, blinking, or making expressions of any kind. If a child could bring a puppet or doll to life without computer-generated tricks, they thought, why wouldn’t that work in a movie, too?
They decided that computer-generated mouth animations would only be used for scenes set in the present, while for scenes set in the past, the puppets would have fixed expressions: they could only express emotions through gestures and pantomime. Modern puppets would be painted with silicone, while characters from the past would be painted in oil, evoking wooden church idols or puppet theater puppets. The contrast between the two styles, past and present, modern and nostalgic, fit perfectly with the themes of the film.
ANIMATION WITHOUT STORYBOARDS
Instead of creating storyboards, the creators adopted a more intuitive and organic process. They built mock-ups of sets, rehearsed with actors, and filmed the entire script from multiple angles. This process allowed them to capture “strange little nuances and real behaviors” and preserve spontaneity in both the performances and the camera work.
By breaking the rules and accepting mistakes, Lavis and Szczerbowski turned accidents into opportunities. The surprising result reminds us that, in both life and art, the most important element of magic is surprise.
Watch the movie:
The girl who cried pearls, Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski, provided by the National Film Board of Canada