‘Seven days in production and seven years in post,’ jokes producer Janet Hadjidimitriou about Michael Snow’s experimental film Corpus Callosum, which she describes as being like Chaplin’s Modern Times for the new millennium.

Snow, considered to be one of Canada’s preeminent contemporary artists, has based his latest film on an exploration of metamorphosis, something he took an interest in during the mid-’50s.

At the time of the idea’s conception, the cost of producing Snow’s vision of the process of shapes shifting into other shapes would have been astronomical, but today with the help of Side Effects ceo Greg Hermanovic and the latest in special effects software the vision is slowly becoming a reality.

The one-hour film, which Hadjidimitriou says has something to delight and offend everyone, is budgeted at around $100,000, with funding coming from a variety of sources including Canada Council, the Mississauga Living Arts Center and others.

Due to the low budget and the staggered manner in which funding is rolling in, things are being done a little differently for Corpus Callosum; instead of engaging a lot of people over a short time, Snow is using a small crew over a long period (the film will be finished near the end of the year). Hermanovic is adjusting the software along the way to handle the needs of the production and posting as they shoot.

‘Because there are so many composite graphics involved, we decided that we would digitize a lot of video and work with it immediately, compositing at the same time so the 3D portions and compositing are done concurrently,’ he says.

Although this leaves Hermanovic with volumes of video to deal with, it also makes the whole process more interesting and gives him more control over the effects.

There are 40 props in one scene, each with its own shadow and the ability to flicker on and off and move around, which means 80 objects in motion at the same time. According to Hermanovic it would be very difficult to manage this with video editing tools, but because of Houdini’s structure he is able to animate everything and composite it on the fly.

‘We are trying to do kinds of motions that are unconventional and very dense, and the complexity of some things is very different than what you would normally expect in a film,’ says Hermanovic. ‘Certainly the length is a factor, but also a lot of what we are doing in this project is compositing and mixing those elements with 3D elements. A lot of it is really pushing our Houdini technology.’

Roughly 100 effects shots make up Corpus Callosum, some exceeding one minute in length and others consisting of layers – all carried out with Houdini software. The effects are being shot on video and transferred to film.

The movie itself has no storyline but instead uses several common realistic settings where certain events could reasonably take place – at home watching tv, in a movie theater or an office. A man and a woman appear and reappear in each setting, and while the clothes don’t change the actors do and at one point merge into one shape.

One scene shows several people in an office when suddenly the screen sort of squeezes up into a corner and then expands again and everyone falls to the ground. As they are falling they turn into babies which in turn transform into eggs which then roll off the screen.

For Hermanovic, the challenges that come with working on Corpus Callosum are not technical but of a more personal nature as this marks his first time working with a director on an entire project as well as shooting live action to be integrated with 3D animation.