So how does anyone ever make a film (never mind three films) called Pop-Up Porno and get them all into Sundance? I had the opportunity to ask producer Holly O’Brien this very question.

To start, Pop-Up Porno is a series of three short films, directed by Stephen Dunn, that tell three real-life dating stories visualized using pages of a pop up book constructed specifically to tell these tales. It’s a remarkably simple premise but created with the same DIY care as one would a personal diary or scrapbook. It becomes a deceptively engaging form of storytelling and the reason the series has been a bit of a talking point around here.

O’Brien and Dunn in their second Public Screening Q&A described their fruitful collaboration on their award-winning short Life Doesn’t Frighten Me?, the closing credits of which were created with the same pop-up book effect. Years later, just before embarking on making Closet Monster, Dunn’s first feature (full disclosure – Closet Monster‘s development and production received support from the Harold Greenberg Fund for whom I work), the idea percolated about making a whole short film using this technique. The duo decided to invest half of their winnings from their second-place finish in the Viewster online short film competition to make a short film. Pop-Up Porno was the result.

AB: Why did you have different artists design various pop up books? Why not have one person design all three?

HoB: Every story is different. The tone of each is different, the experience of the narrator and the experience of the viewer is different so it made sense to us to have different illustrators creating the books. We didn’t want a homogenized feel or look to the films – each film is an entity that can live on its own, telling its own compelling story. Time was also an issue, so we were able to have all three artists working on the books simultaneously.

AB: Did you have a goal in mind for the shorts before you started? For example, did you think of it as a purely festival film(s). Or was it always an interactive project that just happened to get into a major A-list festival?

HoB: We always had the idea of releasing them online. We never really intended to do a festival run with them – in fact we only ever thought that a fest would want one of them so to have Sundance ask for all three is pretty incredible. Early on Stephen had the idea of creating a safe space/website where people could share their online dating horror stories and we would choose our favourites and make more films. Although, we were never really sure how we would fund more of them!

AB: Was there one story that sparked the whole idea of making a series of these films?

HoB: That’s more of a question for Stephen but I think the idea was really just sparked by how our dating landscape has changed. It has become so much easier to have “intimate” encounters that would have previously taken several dates to occur. I think that dating sites have taken out the intimacy of sexual encounters although I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but that’s a whole other topic of conversation! We also wanted to make something that reflected sex and sexual encounters in a non-taboo way – sex is funny and sex is heartbreaking.

AB: I didn’t see any of the traditional financing sources in the credits. Was this self financed?

HoB: As I said, this was completely self financed from beginning to end but we would never have been able to do it without the help from friends who worked for very little and William F White giving us all our equipment for free! We also shot on TV stages that we were given to us for free.  Really, the only way we were able to these films was with the support of people that believed in us and the project.

AB: What are your plans for furthering the series?

HoB:  We would like to create more films, to have a site where people can share their stories (not to be redundant) and we can find the most outrageous or heartwarming to make films out of. Thing is, we don’t want these films to be gratuitous – we want to make films that portray the real, nitty-gritty experiences of anyone and everyone, no matter, colour, religion, gender or sexual orientation. We don’t discriminate!

Alan Bacchus is the Programs Manager for Bell Media’s The Harold Greenberg Fund, overseeing the Script Development Program for Canadian feature films. Alan is a member of the Online Film Critics Society, writing for Exclaim! as well as his own blog, dailyfilmdose.com. Alan has also produced and directed a number of short films.