After many years working on music videos (with clips for Eminem, Pink Floyd, Robbie Williams, Amy Lee, Lindsey Stirling, Sebastián Yatra and Zooey Deschanel’s band, She & Him), and more than 10 years dedicated specifically to paper-based animation, Italian director Stefano Bertelli felt it was time to stop creating only for others and doing commissioned projects and start making what he refers to as “deeply personal projects.”
“Spacetime Chronicles” definitely fits into that category. This 71-minute film that marks Bertelli’s feature debut (he directed a paper animated feature film before, but refers to it more as a test or gateway project), “Spacetime Chronicles” is a visual journey through the mind of Fred, lost in limbo, guided by a cat who acts as his conscience.
A surreal, dreamlike tale that follows the inner journey of a man, suspended between reality and dreamspace, had Annecy artistic director Marcel Jean praising “its surrealist style, along with its DIY approach that bring Michel Gondry and his dream films to mind.” Relying on bricolage, this papercraft stop-motion is, according to Jean, “a genuine technical masterpiece.”
Boarded by Paris-based Urban Sales ahead of Annecy, it’s one of the most eye-catching titles of the Contrechamps selection at this year’s festival. Ahead of the event, Variety spoke to Bertelli about the making of this singular feature.
Stop motion itself has always been part of me since my very first short film, “Rapid Eyes Movements,” back in 1999. But the paper world — the construction of entire paper sets and environments — only truly began for me around 2014.
I’ve always loved independent cinema from the 1990s and early 2000s, films like “Donnie Darko,” “Clerks,” “Memento” and “Enter the Void” by Gaspar Noé, as well as the music videos of Michel Gondry, and I’ve always been drawn to psychological and author-driven storytelling, films that enter directly into the mind of a character.
The origin of “Spacetime Chronicles” actually came from a music video I directed for Camel Power Club. The central image was an airliner, something that, like life itself, experiences highs, lows and turbulence. The concept was also connected to my fascination with investigations, especially documentary series focused on airplane crashes and aviation mysteries.
From that music video, the project evolved first into a short film and then gradually into a feature, although at the beginning I didn’t yet have a complete screenplay. Much of the story took shape progressively during production itself.
When I started working on “Spacetime Chronicles,” one of the first questions I asked myself was: why paper? It wasn’t enough for it to simply be my usual visual style. Even for someone who doesn’t know my background, the film needed to justify this choice on its own.
Over time I realized that paper naturally reflected the instability of the characters and the world around them. It can bend, tear, burn and collapse very easily, and that vulnerability became part of the storytelling itself.
At the same time, paper has something direct and essential about it. It reduces images to simple forms, without realism becoming too dominant. That simplicity was important because the film deals with themes like memory, identity, uncertainty and the idea that life is constantly shifting and impossible to fully control.
Even the atmosphere of the music follows this direction — the feeling of something suspended between the sky and the ground, intimate but also infinite, like a paper world that could disappear at any moment.
The main difficulty was exactly the fragility I mentioned before, because that fragility constantly creates technical limitations. Paper is not malleable like clay: it is rigid, it bends easily, and its movements are much less natural, especially when working with three-dimensional objects.
Over time I developed different techniques to overcome these limits. In many cases I use sequences of models built one by one to simulate movement, or I work with extreme slow motion and approaches that are not strictly connected to traditional stop-motion animation. In the end, the film is also a mix of all my previous experience in video production.
Another complex aspect was not only the animation itself, but also the construction of the sets. Many environments were large structures built as single blocks, such as the interior of the airliner. To support them we needed strong internal frameworks along with all the hidden technical systems behind them: stepper motors, robotics, LED wiring and mechanical systems used to assist certain animated movements.
In this process, Riccardo Orlandi was fundamental. I met Riccardo during one of my first amateur horror films in the early 2000s. We were completely self-taught, like many young people starting out by making horror movies with friends pretending to be actors. Apart from a camera, we basically had no equipment at all. Riccardo immediately became very important. I still remember him building a homemade dolly using metal sheets and a skateboard to create cinematic camera movements. We continued our collaboration, and later we founded our own production company, Seenfilm.
Since then we have always worked together, and he developed a huge amount of experience because we constantly found ourselves dealing with situations we had never encountered before. He is my creative partner on the film, but our collaboration goes back much earlier, to the years when we worked together on live-action sets.
In some ways Riccardo represents the more analog side of the project, while I am more connected to the technological side — cameras, computers and digital tools. But in reality we help each other with everything. We are only two people, but very coordinated.
It took me around four or five months to complete the film, although not continuously, because during that period we were also working on music videos and other commissioned projects.
I honestly couldn’t say exactly how much paper was used. At this point we order materials constantly and regularly, so it’s difficult to keep track of it, but if I had to estimate, probably several thousand sheets in 100×70 cm (39×27 inches) format.
When I decided to introduce extreme slow motion in the film, one of the first ideas was connected to explosions: something extremely fast and violent that could suddenly be frozen in time.
But probably the scenes that gave me the greatest satisfaction are the ones inside the airplane while it overturns: objects flying through the cabin, the light entering through the windows and creating realistic shadows across the interiors. In those moments the film almost feels real, even though everything is entirely made of paper. This approach with slow motion also gave the film a more dramatic quality.
There’s an episode from the Brussels premiere that still makes me smile. I was sitting anonymously in the last rows, exactly as I wanted to be. At the end of the screening, everyone was leaving the theater with a small paper card used to rate the film from one to 10. Near the exit, in a dimly lit corner, there was a small table where people stopped to fill them out. At one point I noticed a man taking a pen and starting to write his vote. I couldn’t resist. I slowly moved closer and closer, almost pulled toward that little piece of paper. Eventually I saw the score: 10 out of 10.
By that point I was standing so close that the man inevitably turned toward me with a suspicious look. I looked at him emotionally and simply said: “Thank you.” Then we both started laughing. That’s exactly why I prefer people not to know I’m in the theater. I want that kind of reaction — spontaneous, instinctive, unfiltered.
I’m not an animation fanatic in the strict sense of the term. I love cinema in a broader way — independent films, documentaries. The animated works that truly stayed with me are mainly author-driven films: Hayao Miyazaki, of course, but also “Waltz with Bashir,” “Persepolis,” and “A Town Called Panic.” Films that use animation not as a genre, but as a necessity, as the only possible way to express a certain idea.
I come from live action and music videos. At a certain point, budgets became so limited that I no longer felt able to express myself properly. I’m not speaking only about money — I’m speaking about mental space. Some ideas are expensive by nature, and in the music video world, even achieving a strong visual quality on set already requires a medium-to-high budget, let alone attempting something narratively ambitious.
So I decided to build my own paper world. A world where I can develop any idea, as long as I respect its internal rules. Animation gave me exactly that: a freedom that the real world would never have allowed me to have.
