ANIMAFEST PRO | ANIMAFEST SCANNER XI | Panel 2: Role of Editor and Editing in Animated Film

Fabricating Filmic Spontaneity for a Contemporary Audience: The Editing of Bob Spit: We Do Not Like People - Samuel Baptista Mariani (Brazil)

PANEL 2 - ROLE OF EDITOR AND EDITING IN ANIMATED FILM
04/06 TUE 15:40-16:10 KIC

Bob Spit: We do not like people was the second stop-motion animated feature produced in Brazilian history and the first to address adult audiences with this technique. It introduced an unprecedented format in the country, achieving significant public acclaim and festival recognition. The film employs an investigative documentary approach, utilizing metalanguage to foster character spontaneity, a technique Coala Filmes has explored since adapting Angeli's work in 2008's The Rê Bordosa Dossier. This reflexivity is historically familiar to documentary theorists or to animated documentary favourites such as Aardman's Creature Comforts and its humorous recontextualizations. However, 2021's Bob Spit distinctively fabricated its behind-the-scenes narrative and its conspiratory relationship to its viewers (as conceptualized in cinema comedy theory) during the editing process, and mostly by repurposing produced materials. In addition to that, editor Eva Randolph and director Cesar Cabral would consider a kind of spectatorship for the film that aligns with Rancière's Emancipated Spectator (2008), by creating levels of spectatoriality that even the characters within would permanently trespass, facilitating transposition of roles between author and spectator. In face of that, this research proposes a careful analysis of the editing process of the film in question, considering, firstly, the reality effects explored for its fabricated-documentary approach, deriving a place for the unusual status of reality in stop motion animation since Barthes' ‘Death of the Author’ argumentation and Jean-Louis Comolli rebranding of the auto-mise-en-scène and, secondly, considering the changing relationship with the contemporary spectator, incorporating Sybil DelGaudio's animation self-evidence concept and Jesús Martín-Barbero's critique on Latin American media's departure from traditionalist linear communication. Four years working at the editing room of the film production provided the author of this presentation with a unique insight into its processes and its influence on and from contemporary Latin American viewers.

Samuel Mariani is a Master's student of media and audiovisual processes at the School of Arts and Communications at the University of São Paulo, member of the research group MidiAto: Language Studies Group on Media Practices. He works as an animator, editor and AI explorer for Coala Films, for the Campinas' Animation Nucleus and for The International Animation Day of Brazil. He acted as editor and DOP for the short Flesh (2019), as assistant editor and 2nd AD for the feature Bob Spit: We Do Not Like People (2021), as lead editor and stop motion animator of the second season of the TV series Angeli The Killer (2021) and puppeteer and lead editor of the TV series Gildo (2024).