The fox and the seagull

I made a 20 second film of the fox on a seafront bench, staring down a seagull over the last half of his sandwich. It borrows the way Sergio Leone shoots the three-way duel at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It is one run of Seedance 2.5, the second of two.

What Leone does in a duel

In the duel nobody does much. Three men stand in a circle and look at each other for about two and a half minutes. The tension comes from the cutting: wide shots of the three of them, then their eyes, their hands, their holsters, cut faster and faster, with the music building under it. Max Tohline's analysis counts about 65 shots in it and almost no movement.

That suits a video model. A still close-up of an eye is about the easiest shot there is to generate, and a locked-off camera keeps a face steady. Fast action is where the model falls apart, and a stand-off has almost none until the very end.

What I chose, and why

The story has to work with the sound off. He has one thing to eat, a gull wants it, they size each other up, and both move at the same moment. The gull is faster. A stranger on mute should be able to say what happened.

The world is real and the fox is the only animated thing. The prompt places him "the way a computer-animated bear is placed into a live-action family film", and the gull is written as a real herring gull with a red spot on its beak and a pale eye with a red ring. The list of things it must not do starts with no cartoon set, and says the gull never talks and never has a human expression.

The camera never moves, because a still camera keeps his face steady from shot to shot.

He stays on the left of the frame and the gull stays on the right, in every shot. So his eye in close-up looks to the right and the gull's eye looks to the left. When the close-ups come fast, that is how you know whose eye it is and what it is looking at.

The prompt describes the music by its instruments: "a lone whistled melody, a twangy electric guitar with reverb, a jaw harp, one distant trumpet, sparse with long silences between the notes". It asks for an original tune and says never any existing film theme. The prompt asks for the music to stop dead at the grab, so the last shot has only wind.

The ending is a picture of what he lost. His paw lands on the empty white paper and the paper flaps beside it while he turns to stare at the camera.

The prompt

It is written as a shot list with the seconds for each beat, then the sound and a list of things it must not do. It was given two of our own pictures, the fox from the front and from behind. Here it is as it was run:

STYLE: Photorealistic live-action film footage, shot on 35mm on a real Irish seafront promenade on a grey, windy afternoon. Real overcast daylight, flat and silver, real wet concrete, real grey sea with whitecaps, slight film grain, wide anamorphic frame. The camera is locked off and never moves; it cuts straight between shots. The close-ups are extreme: a single eye filling the frame from edge to edge, shot on a long lens, held perfectly still. 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 and design stay exactly as the references, with realistic dense orange fur moving in the wind, individual strands catching the grey light, real contact shadows on the bench. Everything around him is real and ordinary. The seagull is a real bird filmed for real, never animated.

PLACE: A plain wooden bench with a metal frame on a concrete seafront promenade, a low sea wall and railing behind it, the grey sea and a flat horizon beyond. Empty promenade, no people. No readable signs, no words anywhere.

CHARACTER - THE FOX: One fox, compact small frame, slim build, fluffy orange fur, cream cheeks, heavy-lidded golden yellow eyes, dark charcoal hoodie, dark blue rolled jeans, brown boots, thick orange tail with a cream tip. He sits on the left half of the bench, on the left of the frame, in every wide and medium shot. Grumpy and unimpressed: eyes alert under flat lids, brows a little low, completely bored expression. Never sleepy, never angry, never shocked. Keep his exact face, fur colour and size the same in every shot. He has exactly two arms and two paws. His body stays seated and calm the whole time; only his head turns and his paw moves where the shots say.

PROP: Half a sandwich, cut into a triangle, white bread with a filling showing at the cut edge, lying on its open, flat white paper wrapper on the bench seat right beside his hip, on his right side, between him and the gull. The sandwich is about the size of his paw. It is the only food in the film.

THE GULL: A real adult herring gull: white head, pale grey back, black wing tips with white spots, yellow beak with a red spot, pale yellow eye with a red ring. It stands on the top of the bench backrest about a metre to his right, on the right of the frame, in every wide and medium shot.

0-3s: Wide shot from the front, the whole bench, the sea wall and the grey sea behind. The fox sits on the bench, paws on his knees, the sandwich on its paper beside his hip. The gull lands on the top of the backrest about a metre to his right and folds its wings.

3-6s: Medium shot from the front, the fox on the left and the gull on the right, the sandwich on the bench between them. The fox slowly turns his head to his right and looks at the gull. The gull turns its head and looks back down at him. They hold each other's look.

6-8s: The same medium shot. The gull looks down at the sandwich, then back up at the fox. The fox keeps looking at the gull.

8-9.5s: Extreme close-up of the fox's eye, golden yellow under a flat lid, filling the frame, looking to the right of the frame towards the gull. It does not blink. Fur moves in the wind.

9.5-11s: Extreme close-up of the gull's pale yellow eye with its red ring, filling the frame, looking to the left of the frame towards the fox. It does not blink.

11-12.5s: Extreme close-up of the half sandwich lying on its flat white paper wrapper on the wooden bench, the wrapper's edge lifting a little in the wind.

12.5-13.5s: Extreme close-up of the fox's eye again. It flicks down towards the sandwich, then back up to the right.

13.5-15s: Extreme close-up of the fox's paw on the bench seat, sliding slowly sideways towards the sandwich on its paper.

15-16s: Extreme close-up of the gull's yellow beak with the red spot, opening a little.

16-17.5s: Medium shot from the front, as before. Both move at once: the fox's paw reaches for the sandwich, and the gull's head darts down first, grabs the sandwich in its beak and flies off out of the frame to the right. The fox's paw lands flat on the empty paper wrapper.

17.5-20s: Hold on the fox alone on the bench, his paw still flat on the empty white wrapper, the wrapper's edge flapping in the wind. He slowly turns his head back to face the camera and stares flat and bored straight into the lens. Nothing else moves.

SOUND: Wind, waves breaking on the sea wall, the gull's wings flapping as it lands, the paper wrapper rustling, the gull's wings flapping away. MUSIC: an original film score in the style of a 1960s Italian western: a lone whistled melody, a twangy electric guitar with reverb, a jaw harp, one distant trumpet, sparse with long silences between the notes, building slowly from the first look to the grab. An original tune, never any existing film theme. The music stops dead the moment the gull grabs the sandwich, and the last shot has only wind. No dialogue, no narration.

NEGATIVE: No cartoon or animated set, no painted background, no game look, everything except the fox is real. The gull is a real bird, not a cartoon bird, it never talks, never has a human expression. Only one gull. No people. No readable words, signs or logos anywhere. No cup, no cone, no chips, no ice cream; the only food is the half sandwich, the size of his paw in every shot. 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 camera never moves, never zooms, never shakes. The fox never stands up, never chases the gull, never gets the sandwich. The fox is always on the left of the frame and the gull always on the right.

Cutting it faster, and why we did not

Leone cuts faster as the duel goes on. So I made a second version in the edit, trimming the six close-ups to 1.5, 1.3, 1.0, 0.9, 0.7 and 0.65 seconds so they speed up into the grab. It costs nothing, since it is a few lines of ffmpeg on the same run. We kept the run as it came out. Its close-ups already run from about 1.6 seconds at the start to about 1.0 at the end, though not shorter at every cut, and the music runs unbroken under them, where in the cut version it is chopped at every join.

What to watch for

Write the turn of the head as its own beat, before any close-up of an eye.

Give every eye close-up a direction. Keep one character on the left and one on the right for the whole film, and say which way each eye looks.

Say how big every prop is against his body, in every shot it is in.

Describe the music by its instruments, ask for an original tune, and say where it stops.

Show what the animal wants. The gull looks down at the sandwich and back up at him, so the viewer knows what the stare is about.

And look before anyone else does. I read every frame at eight frames a second, counted his arms and paws, checked that the world and the gull read as real, and measured the sound level, which falls a long way after the grab. A level reading cannot tell music from wind, and I cannot hear the tune, so whether the music stops, and whether it sounds too much like the real film, is for a person with ears to judge.