A journey through an alien world which was once our own
FABRICATED is a short film that took Brett Foxwell ten long years to complete. He designed, built and animated the creatures and the strange worlds they inhabit. An engineer, designer, builder and animator based in the Bay Area. Brett makes films, worlds and creatures that display a deep level of design, detail, craft and obsession. The incredible detailing in the mechanics makes every frame of this 10 year adventure worth it.
The trailer for Fabricated was featured on Film Shortage back in 2016.
Over the course of the long production, the film moved with me through almost a dozen different apartments in the cities of Chicago, San Francisco, Portland and Oakland.
Engineering jobs and Chicago scrapyards provided me with piles of obscure and beautiful mechanical detritus, which I then re-engineered and sculpted into new forms and uses. It was quite a challenge to fully build out each world. No matter how many props and derelict machines I would build, the horizon would keep calling out for more. The Brass Dome was built inside of a plastic safety mirror and some trickery was used to make 2 quarters seem like a full hemisphere.
“Every second of finished footage in Fabricated took 2-3 hours to animate”
The film is a journey through an alien world which was once our own. Set in a time after organic life has passed from the scene, mechanical creatures are being formed from the materials and the machine aesthetic we have left behind. Therefore, from a pile of discarded parts, a creature named Oto is constructed from steel and bone and sent off. Making his way through an old world that is dying and a new world struggling to be born, Oto begins to sense that he may have a part to play in the evolution of his imperfect kind.
On his journey, Oto encounters a series of landscapes. Starting in a jungle of rusty iron, then progressing through copper. Finally into a world of brass where he meets a wise old man. As a result, Oto ends up in a vast steel wasteland of abandoned machinery. Here lives a mechanical dinosaur named Rex, who is all that stands between Oto and his destiny…
Watch the incredible Behind The Scenes work from Brett.
