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Never Like the First Time! was Jonas Odell’s first animated documentary. He made the film back in 2006, where it won the Golden Bear Award for best short subject at the Berlinale Film Festival, as well as a Guldbagge in Sweden, and other prizes He followed up the film with the equally successful short animated doc Lies in 2008. Both before and after these forays into non-fiction he has been animating fiction shorts, commercials, and music videos, even getting a Grammy nomination and winning an MTV Music Award for the Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" video.I wanted to know how one decides to make a project about losing your virginity, without including your own tale of getting a piece of tail. Jonas was nice enough to answer.VICE: How did this project come to you?
Jonas Odell: I felt for a while that a lot of animation was becoming quite self-referential, at best referencing other films, at worst referencing other animated films. Doing something based on real people's personal stories felt almost like opening up a window to let some air in. I was also interested in how several stories on the same subject add up to something more than just the sum of the parts when put next to each other, so I wanted to let a group of people each tell the story of the same event in their respective lives.How many interviews did you have to go through before you found the final four?
About 30 interviews were made in total, and then we went back to do additional interviews with some of the people who we felt might work in the film. The final selection was done based on which stories we felt might work best together and complement each other.
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We really picked stories based on whether we thought we could do them justice in the film. All the stories people told are of course worth retelling, so the selection wasn't about the quality of the stories. Rather, it was about the balance in the film and about what we thought we could do with the stories.How did you develop the style of animation for each interview?
I knew early on in the process that I wanted the style of each story to come out of the mood of the story itself, rather than to predefine the style of the film. We used a mix of live action and animation in a couple of the stories where we felt the motion of real people rather than animated ones would provide the right feeling for what we wanted.What are you working on now?
Apart from commercials and music videos, there is another short based on interviews in production.Any plans to ever make a feature?
I have one project that we are trying to get financed at the moment. No animation in it, though.Thanks Jonas and good luck.Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.@PRISMindexPreviously - I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'Madame Tutli Putli'
