The smallest film ever made gets outdoor Dublin premiere

Tod & Viv, a two and a half minute animated movie by Irish writer Julian Gough, will premiere on Dublin’s Liberty Hall late Friday night, as part of the Playhouse Project.

The Playhouse Project has been showing short animations for the past two weeks, using two sides of Liberty Hall as an immense 16-story television screen.

Says Julian Gough, “It’s a very low resolution TV screen – each window is a pixel, so it’s only 10 pixels by 16 on each side. So very strong, simple images show up well. People have done some great stuff, mostly a single idea, often a single image, moving or repeating, and a bit of music as a soundtrack. Someone did Space Invaders, someone did static… But I thought it would be interesting to be madly ambitious, and make an entire feature film, with love and death and murder and forgiveness… I wanted to see if you could make a film that told a story that was strong & simple enough to work on this amazing screen, that was so primitive and high-tech at the same time. And a film that was written for Liberty Hall, that used the fact that the screen was also a building in Dublin. And could you pack it all into in a couple of minutes?”

The result is Tod & Viv, a-two-and-a-half minute murder mystery/ghost story/drama that starts with the words “Tod & Viv live in a big house…” as two windows light up on Liberty Hall. It wouldn’t be giving anything away to say that Tod & Viv are trapped in a hellish relationship. And, as Flann O’Brien said (in the original title for the Third Policeman), “Hell goes round and round…”

“You could loop the film, and they’d be killing each other forever,” Gough resumes. “I wrote it as a loop, because I couldn’t be sure people would catch the start of it, walking along the Quays, or over O’Connell Bridge. This way, they’d get the whole story even if they only started watching halfway through. But you wouldn’t want to watch it more than twice, it would wreck your head pretty quickly. It’s all death, nightmares, and slamming doors.”

The project may be high-tech (100,000 low energy LED lights, lighting up 330 windows) but the animation for this particular movie is minimal in the extreme.
“Yes, Tod is a single pixel. And Viv is also a single pixel. Two pixels in love. It doesn’t get more minimal than that. My favourite bit is where Tod takes off his clothes to have a bath. A single pixel turns from white to pink… Most of the effort went into the soundtrack, which will go out simultaneously on the radio in the area around the building on 94.3FM. I had kids pounding up and down five flights of stairs in our apartment in Berlin to get the footsteps, and slamming doors. Luckily, our upstairs neighbour is a professional actress, Elisa Gelewski, who’s done a lot of TV and theatre in Germany. So she popped downstairs, we put on a pot of coffee, and she recorded the only line of female dialogue. Berlin is a bit like Sesame Street, if you need someone to help you with a film or anything else, you just lean out the window and shout.”

Tod & Viv has its world premiere late on Friday night, half an hour after midnight, and can be watched live on www.justin.tv/playhousedublin. A film of the performance, taken from across the river, will be available later on the internet.