Still: What is, is now - Jikke Lesterhuis

On an intertidal sandbank stands a roadside restaurant for birds. But this is a restaurant with a difference. Its diners represent all the creatures in the food chain, and each turns up both to eat and be eaten. But when a human foot enters the scene, all sense of ecological harmony is permanently eradicated.

Jikke Lesterhuis’ What is, is now may be an amusing film to watch – even the human foot which puts paid to the restaurant’s existence has more than a touch of Monty Python about it – but it delivers a powerful environmental message. “I always like to make a message more in a humorous way, instead of a very serious way. It works better if you say it with a laugh,” the director tells SEE NL.

“You get a connection with the characters and with the sets, because it's all so detailed and so fragile,” she adds of the preparation that went into the film’s mise-en-scène, and the underlying meaning she wishes to impart.

“We live in very fragile surroundings, so we have to take care of them instead of just walking over and destroying them. That was the meaning of the foot in the end. I wanted to show how fragile it all is and how easily we can destroy everything without even noticing it.”

The two-minute film, which took eight months to complete, received ‘ultra-short’ funding from the Netherlands Film Fund.

Lesterhuis is a self-taught filmmaker who moved to Amsterdam initially to study product design and cultural heritage. A keen draughtswoman/illustrator she realised early in her career however that she could make a living using her drawing skills. Furthermore, when one of her clients asked if she could do animation, she gave the correct freelancer’s answer of ‘yes, of course,’ and duly set out to learn the new craft.

“I started with 2D animation first, which was always hand-drawn frame by frame,” she says. “Then after a while, I realised that I wanted something more physical…so I tried some 3D digital animation, but that was just computer work. So after a month I quit because it was too much computer work for me.”

“But then I found stop-motion animation, and that was all the things that I like combined. That was the best solution for me.”

Lesterhuis points out how cutting the film to ultra-short length presented a lot of challenges. “It was really important for me that all parts of the food chain should be highlighted. Everything should have an equal part in the film, because that's how it is in real life. So that was quite hard, to give all the characters enough space to explain themselves. The shorter the story is the harder it gets to make it right. Everything that you say is for a reason. There's nothing that's there just to fill up space.”

Lesterhuis tells SEE NL that she is working on two further films. In development is the 15-20 minute part-live action, part stop-motion short I'm A Puppeteer, which will also include some puppet work as part of the film will be set in a marionette theatre.

The other film is the live-action Emoji, about the invasive effect of emoticons and our over-reliance upon them. “I find it weird, also quite funny in a way, that we choose to express ourselves with emoticons instead of the features we are born with. So now I'm developing a film [about this] which will play in a complete small-scale paper set. The actor will be live-action with green screen placed in the reduced-sized set,” she says.

“Emoji will be a very weird and absurd film.”