They are beautiful and carnivorous. Sometimes, the female devours the male during copulation. They have a special elegance, as if in their slow and deliberate movements they were deeply absorbed in thought. I knew little more about mantises when I first had the idea to make a film about them, so I started to investigate how they exactly lived, moved, hunted, mated, reproduced, and died. This investigative phase was going to completely change the character and intention of it.

I spent many weeks at the insectarium observing, drawing and recording praying mantises. I became friends with the insectarian, who allowed me to handle them and to feed them. I could watch in detail their lightning hunting strike. I accumulated hours of footage. I devoured every detail I could find about their lifestyle.

I found the different aspects of mantis life fascinating, and I wanted to transmit that fascination. In the natural world there is no good or evil, no moral. Only life, transformation and death. But life all over again. My intention became to show a poetic meditation about this cycle and the instinct for survival and preservation. The importance that the cannibalistic sexual behaviour had had on my original treatments also faded to a secondary place, as just another characteristic of mantids.

But I wanted to be narrative and provide an experience, not give a lesson in natural sciences. My fascination with those insects had grown so deep, that I wanted to stay true to the biological facts. But on a couple of occasions I favoured my dramatic arc.

I also had the idea of showing a bigger scale, the sun and the earth, and suggesting how its ebb and flow affected the small scale, the insects and their lives. It all felt contemplative, primal and subtle. I had to decide how this would look.
I knew oriental art, the beautiful calligraphy, the vertical rice-paper rolls with delicately rendered flowers and birds, energetic waterfalls, flowing lines depicting landscapes, fish, or insects. My film had many of those elements. Something about the grace and simplicity of those drawings, the way their non-realism captured the essence of the subject better than a photograph would have, made the choice obvious.
I started learning about how oriental artists paint the world. Their way of approaching composition, perspective, colour, balance, light and shadow is unique. They are not interested in how an object looks, but what that object is, or represents.
But I was going to use a three-dimensional animation program that treats objects as solids possessing three dimensions, not stylised renderings. So I had to find a method of turning 3D objects into painterly shapes.

It's all in the rendering process. By combining outlines of the objects that resembled a line ink drawing with simple coloured fills, deformed to suggest smeared watercolours, I produced an image that looked like an oriental painting, yet retained a sense of space and three-dimensionality.

The sound for Mantis evolved in a similar way, becoming simpler and simpler. From the beginning it was clear that the soundtrack would be naturalistic and atmospheric. I still thought that it was important to have music of some sort, to suggest an emotional tone to certain scenes.

The final sound is composed of two main layers. One is made of the sounds of the insects and their environment. The other is made of abstract and subtle melodies. The two are tightly interwoven, and the result is a musically colored atmosphere. Like the image, the sound doesn't always reproduce reality, but expresses its essence.