“It’s 11 minutes[long],” he said. “That’s about a minute a month.”
Lachlan Pendragon has been nominated for best animated short film at the Oscars for An Ostrich Told Me The World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It.Supplied
All that painstaking work on a stop-motion animation with a cute title,An Ostrich Told Me The World Is Fake And I Think I Believe It,paid off when it was nominated for the 95th Academy Awards early on Wednesday (AEDT).
Pendragon,26,was thrilled as he watched actors Riz Ahmed and Allison Williams announce via his computer screen that he was up for best animated short film.
“It was bizarre and really exciting,” he said. “It was a shock and funny to hear them read out the entire long title of the film.”
In other Australian nominations,including best picture and Cate Blanchett is up for best actress forTar.
Pendragon saidAn Ostrich Told Me started as a project for his PhD studies at Griffith University Film School. It cost about $6000 to make,partly funded by the university.
The film qualified for the Oscars when he won the gold medal at the Student Academy Awards and best Australian short at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year.
Pendragon,who taught animation at the university for an income last year,became interested in filmmaking in high school.
“I always thought I’d do live-action filmmaking and that’s what I applied for when I left high school,” he said. “But I didn’t get in,so I applied for animation as a back-up. I fell into it by accident.”
Australian filmmaker Lachlan Pendragon has been nominated for an Oscar for his film,An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It?
While Adam Elliot famously made his 2004 Oscar-winning animated shortHarvie Krumpet in a Melbourne storage unit that was often so hot that he would work in just his underpants,Pendragon kept his clothes on as he painstakingly made his film.
“I was in the living room during lockdown,” he said. “It’s pretty extraordinary that you can make something like that in your living room by yourself and it can go this far.”
While he has made “lots of stuff that I’ve put out into the world”,Pendragon describesAn Ostrich Told Me as the first big time-consuming film that he’s made. Well,not so big.
He describes it as a comedy about an office worker who slowly realises he is living in a stop-motion universe.
A comic story about an office worker slowly realising he is living in a stop-motion universe:An Ostrich Told Me Ihe World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It.Supplied
To explain why it centres on an ostrich rather than an emu,he would have to divulge too much of the plot. “There is a reason and it will make sense why it’s an ostrich,” he said.
Like many other budding short film directors,Pendragon’s long-term plan is to make a feature film.
“It’s something that I always thought was a long way away,but I’m starting to realise that I should be thinking about it now while I’ve got this amazing window of opportunity,” he said.
Half a day after the nominations,Pendragon still felt “a bit befuddled” by what had just happened.
The titular bird in Lachlan Pendragon’s short film An Ostrich Told Me The World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It.Supplied
But he was looking forward to meeting other filmmakers,including Guillermo del Toro,whose Pinocchio is up for best animated feature film.
“Gosh,that would be amazing to rub shoulders with some of those amazing filmmakers,” he said.
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