THE TEAM
Nisan Denizci
Nisan Denizci was born in Istanbul in 1997. She went to the Italian High School and then completed her undergraduate degree in the film department of the New York School of Visual Arts (SVA). Although her concentration was on cinematography, she focused on animation because of her lifelong obsession with stop-motion. Following college, she worked as an independent animation artist for the documentary series “99 Snapshots”. After returning to Istanbul in 2021, she started working at Depo Film as an assistant producer, where she made creative and technical contributions to many commercial and short films. Since 2022, she has been working as an independent filmmaker and working on To Catch a Nut from her home studio.
Yasemin Orhan
Yasemin Orhan was born in Istanbul in 1995. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film/Animation/Video from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2018. While in school, she became fascinated by the mechanics of motion after taking a course in physical animation, which introduced pre-cinema devices such as the zoetrope. She began working early on as an animator and assistant for many projects at school and with professional artists. In 2019, she reached out to Signe Baumane and joined the production team of “My Love Affair With Marriage” as a set painter. After working in the independent animation industry for a couple of years, she returned to school in 2022 for a master's degree at the Bergen Art Academy in Norway. She has since been making animated shorts, collaborating with Nisan on this project, and moving apartments every few months.
BACK STORY
The story of To Catch a Nut was born out of Nisan and her friend Dacha toying with the idea of stop-motion porn when they were both students at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). After the relief of finding another living soul fantasizing about this, they sat down together to scribble the first episode while still in college. That’s how the concept came to be.
When the pandemic turned the world upside down and relocated many people, Nisan was one of them. She returned to her home country and eventually found a job as an assistant producer which meant long work hours with sporadic sleep. Her dream project was put far out on the shelf.
After realizing that the 3-day wage of a horse on the film set was higher than her monthly salary, Nisan quit her job to dedicate herself full-time to set and puppet fabrication. Her sets first took over her bedroom, then her living room, eventually turning their family apartment into an animation studio.
By the fall of 2023, Nisan was done with the sets and ready to start shooting the first episode of To Catch a Nut. This is when Yasemin comes into the picture. She was on a break from school in Turkey, recovering from wrist surgery. Barely knowing each other, the two met at Istanbul Modern to check out the museum after its big renovation. At some point, they found themselves on the museum’s terrace watching seagulls bicker over a spot at what seemed to them like a communal bathhouse. That somehow led to the beginning of their collaboration... maybe because they had a sense for each other's humor and both were deeply in love with animation.
So it went, and Yasemin arrived at Nisan’s a few days later with a backpack, thinking she’d stay for two weeks. Doing animation by hand without AI or a handful of team members takes a hell of a lot of time. Those two weeks turned into three months, then two years as they shot thousands of frames, took breaks to show up to other commitments, all the while building an intricate collaboration based on their beloved craft and complementary visions.
?WHERE ARE WE NOW
We are currently on a break from shooting because Yasemin is working on our fundraising campaign, and Nisan is fabricating the puppets for the close-up scenes and organizing voice recordings for our pilot episode's characters. We shot 7 minutes of footage, finished two scenes and once back in Nisan's Istanbul (home) studio, we will begin animating the explicit scenes where Emmy and John will heat the room.
So far, we have been doing everything by ourselves with our own means, needless to say, without any financial return. We decided to make a crowdfunding campaign because the production and our vision became larger and larger to the point of not being able to sustain it by ourselves. We need to hire voice actors and team members for post-production, sound music, and titles. We will use the funds to pay the fairest amount we are capable of and cover the essentials of the production cost, such as materials, software, and studio equipment. Our Kickstarter campaign is scheduled for the beginning of February. We need support to finish this awesome project.