One day on the block

I joined three of our short fox films into one film, a day on one Brooklyn block in the summer of 1989. At 11 in the morning he buys an ice cream, and his first lick knocks the scoop onto the pavement. At 3 in the afternoon the kids have the fire hydrant open, and the water stops the moment he steps under it. At 8 in the evening he queues for a hot dog, and the shutter comes down when he gets to the front. Then a forecast: tomorrow, 99 degrees. It runs 58 seconds and was made just for fun.

Why three films make one day

The ice cream film and the fire hydrant film were made a day apart, from the same style block in the prompt: 35mm film in 1989, one Brooklyn block of brownstones and stoops, a low wide camera with a tilt, and the fox as the only animated thing in a real street. So they already looked like the same street. Both also tell the same kind of joke. He wants one small thing on a hot day, he gets right up to it, and he loses it.

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) is one day on one block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, on the hottest day of the summer, and the heat rises as the day goes on. That gave the joined film its shape. If the scenes run morning, afternoon and evening, three separate jokes become one day in his life, and the same joke three times starts to read as a pattern: this is just how his days go.

The day needed an ending, and the evening scene was Paul's idea. In his words: "he lines up to a hot dog window of a restaurant take away place and shutter comes down when he gets to top of the line." It's the same joke as the hydrant, but louder, and it also closes the day, because a shop shutting is what the end of a day looks like on a street.

The cards

Paul's idea was to open with a card, the way the canyon film opens with "A Run with Foxes production". Lee's films open with "A Spike Lee Joint", so this one opens with "A Run with Foxes Joint".

Between the scenes, the cards give the time and the temperature: 11 AM, 94 degrees, then 3 PM, 98 degrees, then 8 PM, 91 degrees. In Do the Right Thing it's the radio DJ who keeps telling the block how hot it is, so the temperature is the Lee touch. The numbers are made up. They rise through the day and fall a little at night, the way a real heatwave day does.

The last line is a forecast, "TOMORROW. 99°", and then runwithfoxes.com. The forecast carries on from the other cards, so it reads as the end of the day rather than a slogan. It's deadpan like him, and it adds one more joke: he lost three times today, and tomorrow will be hotter.

Every card is set in Anton, off-white on black, centred across and down on the letters themselves, with no words on any picture. The cards are drawn in Python with Pillow, frame by frame, and joined to the scenes with ffmpeg. Under the last half second of each card, the street sound of the next scene fades in, so you hear the block before you see it. To keep the sound in sync, the same half second comes off the start of each scene's picture, which only shortens the rooftop shot that opens it.

The evening scene

The hot dog scene is new, and it is written from the hydrant film's prompt, with the light changed to dusk. "The sky a deep warm orange fading to blue above the rooftops, the street lights just coming on with an orange sodium glow, the warm yellow light of a take-away window spilling onto the pavement." Each light is named by where it comes from, so the evening is made of things on the street, the same way the heat was in the other two.

It opens the way the others do, high above the block, so the joined film has three rooftop shots: the block at 11, at 3 and at 8. The third is the best shot in the film, with the Manhattan skyline dark against an orange sky and one lit corner below with a short queue outside it.

The lead-up is a close-up of feet. Grown-ups' sneakers and sandals shuffle forward on the cracked pavement in the orange light, and his small trainers step up after them. It shows the queue moving, and how small he is in it, without a walk towards the camera.

Then he is shot from behind at the bright window, the angle that worked at the hydrant: him small in the middle of the frame, the cook inside. The next shot is the shutter already down, him alone in front of it, and the people from the queue walking off behind him eating their hot dogs. The crash of the shutter is on that cut. You don't see the shutter come down. You hear it, and then it's shut, which is faster and, I think, funnier.

What isn't perfect

This was made for fun over two evenings, and some of it shows.

His trainers change in every scene. In the morning they are low white trainers with a dark blue Nike swoosh, in the afternoon white high-tops, and in the evening white trainers with a thin red stripe. Each prompt asked for white high-tops, and the model made its own choice each time.

There is made-up lettering on screen. A sign over the corner in the evening rooftop shot, the menu board in the take-away window and a small sign on the wall all came out as letters that spell nothing. The hydrant says PRESSURE on its side, cast into the metal.

The model doesn't time things to the second. It brought the shutter in sideways and slowly, so I cut that shot and let the sound do the work. It swung the hydrant's jet across the road rather than stopping it dead, so the hydrant scene cuts away to the hand on the hydrant before the swing. In one queue shot he faced the camera while everyone else faced the window, so that shot came out too.

The first run of the evening scene was refused by the model's safety filter, which gives no reason. I took out two lines, one about teenagers in the queue and one comparing his size to a five-year-old child, and the second run went through. I don't know which line it was.

And the temperatures are made up, so don't plan a trip on them.

The evening prompt

The prompts for the other two scenes are in The fox and the ice cream and The fox and the fire hydrant. This is the hot dog scene, run with two of our own pictures, the fox from the front and from behind, and no picture of the place:

STYLE: Real live-action film footage, shot on grainy 35mm film stock in 1989 on location on a run-down residential street in Brooklyn, New York, at the end of a heatwave day. It looks like a gritty, low-budget independent film of that year: raw, real, slightly faded colour, heavy film grain, nothing polished. Dusk: the sky a deep warm orange fading to blue above the rooftops, the street lights just coming on with an orange sodium glow, the warm yellow light of a take-away window spilling onto the pavement, long soft shadows. No sun rays, no lens flare, no haze effects. The street is real and worn: cracked pavement, rusty fire escapes, black rubbish bags on the kerb, an old car. The colour comes from real things: red brick, the orange street lights, the yellow window, people's summer clothes. Every shot after the first is from very low down, almost on the ground, on a wide-angle lens, looking up, the frame tilted a little off level. The camera is locked off within each shot and cuts straight between shots. The stylized fox character from [Image1] and [Image2] is placed into this real world the way a computer-animated bear is placed into a live-action family film: his face stays exactly as the references, with realistic dense orange fur, real contact shadows on the pavement. He is the only animated thing in the film. Everything and everyone around him is real, photographed for real.

PLACE: The same Brooklyn block of red brick brownstones with high front stoops and iron railings. On the corner, a small take-away place serves hot dogs through one open window in its brick front, lit warm yellow inside, a real cook in a white T-shirt and paper hat handing hot dogs out through it, steam rising off the grill behind him. Above the window, rolled up, is a grey metal roll-down shutter. A short queue of real people waits on the pavement in front of the window: a man in a vest, a woman with a shopping bag, an older man in a cap. Box fans turn in the open windows above, people still sit out on the stoops in the warm evening. No readable signs, labels, menus, graffiti or words anywhere.

CHARACTER - THE FOX: One fox, small and slight: the top of his red cap comes only up to the grown-ups' waists, and he is thinner than any of them. Slim build, fluffy orange fur, cream cheeks, heavy-lidded golden yellow eyes, thick orange tail with a cream tip. He wears a plain white sleeveless vest, a plain red baseball cap with no logo, his two ears standing up through it, dark blue rolled jeans and white high-top trainers. Bored and grumpy in every shot: eyes alert under flat, heavy lids, brows a little low, mouth a flat line. His expression never changes, even when he wants the hot dog. Keep his exact face, fur colour and his small size against the people the same in every shot. He has exactly two arms and two paws. He stands on the pavement in every shot.

0-3s: High shot looking down from a rooftop over the same Brooklyn block at dusk: the street lights coming on, people on the stoops, and on the corner the warm yellow window of the take-away with a short queue on the pavement in front of it, and at the very back of the queue, small, the fox in his red cap and white vest.

3-7s: Wide shot from low down on the pavement, looking up along the queue towards the yellow window. The cook hands a hot dog out to the woman at the front and she walks off eating it. The queue shuffles one step forward. The fox, at the back, shuffles forward with it, his face bored and grumpy.

7-10s: Close-up at ground level of the queue's feet on the cracked pavement in the orange street light: grown-ups' sneakers and sandals, and among them his small white high-tops. The feet in front step forward and his trainers step forward after them.

10-13s: Shot from low down just behind the fox, him small in the centre of the frame with his back to us, the bright yellow window in front of him, the cook inside behind it. The man in front of him takes two hot dogs and walks away out of the frame, and the fox steps up to the front, alone at the window, the warm light on his face and vest.

13-14.5s: Close-up from the side at the window, his face in profile on the left of the frame, the bright window on the right. At that exact moment the grey metal shutter slams down from the top of the window to the sill in one fast drop, with a loud metal crash, right in front of his nose. The yellow light is gone and his face is lit only by the orange street light.

14.5-17.5s: Wide shot from low down, tilted. He stands alone in front of the shut grey shutter, the corner dark now, the street lights orange, the sky deep blue. Behind him the people from the queue walk away along the pavement eating their hot dogs. He has not moved.

17.5-20s: Close-up of his face from the front, low down, tilted, the cap brim above his eyes, the shut grey shutter behind him, orange street light on his fur. He stares, flat and bored, straight into the lens.

SOUND: A warm summer evening on a city street: the sizzle of the grill, people chatting in the queue and on the stoops, distant traffic. MUSIC: an original late-1980s hip-hop beat with a heavy drum and bass line, playing from a big portable radio on a stoop, never any existing song. The music cuts dead on the crash of the shutter, and only the far-off traffic and the buzz of the street lights are left. No dialogue, no narration.

NEGATIVE: Not animated, not a cartoon, not a 3D animated film, no computer-generated people or buildings, no rendered or polished look, no sun rays, no lens flare, no painted background, no game look. Everything except the fox is real, live-action photography. The fox never has wide eyes, never grins, never smiles, never opens his mouth wide, never looks excited or cute. No hoodie. The fox never gets a hot dog and never holds any food. The shutter does not come down slowly or in stages, it drops all at once when he reaches the front. No one pulls the shutter down on screen before it drops. No readable words, signs, labels, menus, graffiti or logos anywhere, nothing written on the shutter, the window or the cap. No dog, no bird, no other animal. No second fox, no change to his face, no feral animal on all fours, no human hands on the fox, no extra arms or paws, no distorted anatomy, no floating. The fox is never as big as the people.

The rules I took from it

Write every scene of a longer film from the same style block, and it will look like one place before you have edited anything.

Let the cards carry the story between scenes. A time and a temperature say more than a title, and they make three jokes into one day.

When the model won't do a moment on cue, cut to the moment after it and let the sound tell you what happened.

And check the sound against the picture after every join. Find one loud hit in each scene, a splat or a crash, and make sure it lands where it did in the scene on its own.