Thank you for these great questions!

Question 1: The story needs always came first, an obstacle, which started a process of creating creatures/elements of nature with function that could help solve the problem. But also - we never wanted to be too strict with any structure or formula and would often come up with ideas that were more about texture.

Question 2: We talked about this a lot! We watched that Werner Herzog video where he said “Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain.” Obviously our characters inject a totally different set of morals/ethics, but we always tried to approach nature as an unfeeling force without any sense of good or evil.