January 8th, 2024 
Jackson Murphy 
It’s a day in the life of a worker who loves ballet dancing and lives in a… Dog Apartment. Ordinary for him. Unique for us. This short comes from director Priit Tender, who is thrilled to be on the 96th Oscars Best Animated Short Film shortlist. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was conducted as an Email Interview and edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: What do you love about stop-motion animation?
Priit Tender: The touch of reality – sculpting the characters, choosing textures and materials, organizing the space of a set. It’s all real, even the team members. You have to go and talk to them, they listen, we discuss. I loved to cover a huge field with a mixture of clay and papier mache. It felt muddy and nice.
JM: Are daily routines good or bad for people?
PT: As a freelancer I prefer to go out for drinks on Tuesday nights. Tuesdays are nice as you don’t get all that Friday night crowd. They are annoying and unprofessional. I must say that my Tuesday night routine suffered a lot because of almost a one-year long stop motion shoot. I hated it. Routine is good for me.
JM: What was it like animating the dancing?
PT: I found a reference of Rudolf Nurejev dancing and gave it to the animator. We discussed the body plastics and rhythm of it quite thoroughly. He then played it frame by frame while animating and tried to follow the movements with the puppet. It’s way more complicated than doing rotoscopy in 2D.
JM: Can you describe making the giant dog head sticking out of the house?
PT: I made a small plasticine model of a dog head and told the set builders to make it big. They did that. The most annoying thing was to make the bricks. Luckily we had a French intern and she spent two weeks scratching the bricks on the dog head. Those poor young people are so happy to get an internship in the studio and then they end up scratching a dog head with a chisel.
JM: What were your goals with commentary on dogs barking loudly?
PT: I had no idea to comment on anything with a barking house. Life itself gave a context to it. Just when we were making the sound the Ukrainian war started. Seeing a barking house cracking apart was exactly the imagery one could see on all TV news – houses hit by shells and rockets. That was a very dark parallel between life and animation.
JM: What would an Oscar nomination for “Dog Apartment” mean to you?
PT: I’d have to find a proper suit for the gala. But it would be great for my country, Estonia. We have never won an Oscar and it’ll be a strong argument for our filmfunds to continue supporting independent animation.
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