BUTTY

Short Talk with Moritz Henneberg (director), Julius Drost (producer) and Danilo Micic (sound)

Germany / 2023 / 7’

BEST STUDENT ANIMATION FILM Category

21st IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: Butty is the clumsy household robot of a family and tries to do his best every day.
When he blows up the oven and destroys the lasagne, he ruins daughter Ally's long-awaited birthday party. Her mother is furious and tells him to fix it, but he only makes things worse. The mother tells him to go away. Butty is so ashamed that he leaves his family. 

Biography: Moritz Henneberg was born in Berlin in 1998 and studies film at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (BHT). He has been working as a writer and director since 2019 and has made fictional short films, documentaries and an animated short film. 

Moritz Henneberg, director

Neda Valcheva (author): Tell me Moritz, what part of human life and experience inspired you to tell this story of a robot and his human feelings that he tried to express?

Moritz Henneberg (director): The idea was that Butty is kind of like viewed as a pet from his mother’s perspective, but also like something like a toaster- a device that has to work perfectly, but in fact the robot is very clumsy and has its own mind. This short animation is just the beginning: we wrote a bigger screen play and this is just the first act. When he gets out of the house he is learning that even robots make mistakes and even as a robot he does not have to be perfect.

Neda Valcheva: Perfectionism is something many people come across in their lives, were you perfectionist while working on the film?

Julius Drost (producer): Of course, we tried to be very professional, but we had a very tight schedule, so we had to skip a lot of things. If you look closely, “Butty” is a movie that has a lot of mistakes in it - a lot of technical mistakes, but also production wise it was all over the place. We are glad that we even managed to do the first seven minutes. There are a lot of things we wish we could have done.

Neda Valcheva: What was your approach with the style of animation?

Julius Drost: This is the first time that we did animation so we tried to keep it as simple as possible and stick with the basics.

Moritz Henneberg: First we designed the main character and then we built the whole house, where the story took place. After that we went to a motion capture studio and I played the robot, and Juluis played the mom. In the studio we tracked our movements and we transformed them into the animation.

Julius Drost: Because there was not enough time to animate all of it, we decided to go with motion capture that pretty much defined the look of the film.

Neda Valcheva: Danilo, can you tell us more about the sound and your approach to it?

Danilo Micic (sound): We basically were thinking how there are a lot of movies with robots and the common sounds that they are making. We did not like these stereotypical sounds in the majority of robot films so we decided to take more of a mechanical approach in creating the sound. We did not include the strange “beep” and “boop”, which in some movies really fits well, but in our case we thought to take a more natural approach. That was the idea behind the sound of the robot.

Author's view (Petar Penev):
 
Butty is a short student animation by Moritz Henneberg. It presents the reality of life in the "one-task-after-another" mindset which we have largely adopted, and the small catastrophes it can bring with it.
 
We have all been in situations where our routine and workload make us feel like robots. This is a feeling which the work quite literally takes and presents to its audience. When every little mistake is frowned upon and every distraction comes with consequences, pressure inevitably takes its toll. Trying to suppress normal human impulses to keep the work pipeline running smoothly is an unsuccessful strategy. Change cannot be effected by a single individual, which is why when one part of the system fails, it is discarded and abandoned.
 
Presented through an accessible metaphor, this movie speaks to the general inability of humans to keep up with the pace and demands of the world we have created for ourselves.