From the Cutting Room Floor

One of the things about working the old analogue way is that you can't but help produce huge quantities of physical artwork, and it's all got to be stored... somewhere. The 35,000 cels that went into the production of The Last Belle are still packed in their 75 boxes, the drawings in their own separate stack of boxes, and the 200 plus background paintings tucked away in a variety of bespoke folders.

While scrabbling through some old boxes of stuff for the previous posts I came across a (thankfully small) collection of artwork that never made it to the final cut of the film. Most of this stuff was shot onto film but cut later during the editing process, although a few pieces never even got as far as the camera. Here are three backgrounds that didn't make it:

This tower block was drawn up by Mark Naisbitt. The artwork is about a metre high which allowed us to...

...move the camera right into a close-up section at the top and still hold the detail. I remember it seemed to take me forever to paint in the various drab shades of window colour... I listened to endless radio plays during the course of this work just to stop myself going insane. But it was all in vain - I cut the scene out before it got shot.

I did this little colour study of the inside of a London Underground train carriage...

This time it was the London Underground seat-patterning (all authentic) that drove me nuts. And once again it was all in vain... I scrapped the shot in favour of a better idea.

This down view of the exterior of the bar building was painted to allow us to...

...pull back and pan up over the rooftops...

...to a wide view of the skyline at night, featuring an exaggerated angle on the 'Gherkin' building. Excuse the crappy picture quality here as it's impossible to reproduce all the additional lighting effects / mattes / blends and so forth that went into the final shot. This artwork was filmed and made it into my first cut of the film, but I chopped it out later to speed up the flow of the story. Oh well...

Quite what I'm going to do with all this unused artwork is another matter. There is no delete button that will make it vanish effortlessly and painlessly. Perhaps if I collected all the unused stuff from my future projects it could be glued together to make a whole new film one day... a sort of Roger Corman school of recycling.

TAAFI Screening

The Last Belle will be screening at the Toronto Animation Arts Festival International (click here for their website), which is taking place between July 6th - 8th. Their website will post more details of programmes and times shortly...

Last Belle in Brooklyn

The Last Belle is to receive its U.S premiere at The Brooklyn Film Festival (June 1st - 10th). For more details click HERE

Soundtrack Recording

Stuart Hancock, composer of The Last Belle score.

Here's a new piece of behind-the-scenes footage from the scoring session of The Last Belle (click here).

As I wrote a zillion posts back, working with Stuart and the orchestra was an absolute highlight of the whole production process. I can't wait to do it again on another project. Pure magic.

Cake and Jelly

Oscar Grillo, Geoff Dunbar, Mark Moore (headteacher at Clifton
College), Nick Park, Peter Lord, Richard Williams and me.

I went to a wonderfully sociable dinner in Bristol a couple of weeks back with various figures from the animation industry (Oscar Grillo has put all his photos and his accompanying commentary on his Facebook page here). At one point Dick Williams and Oscar - both superb draughtsmen themselves - were discussing various artists, including Kathe Kollwitz, and I had to confess that I had never come across her work until Dick showed me some prints of hers only a year or two back.

Kathe Kollwitz: images of great suffering...

... and tenderness.

Surely one of life's great pleasures is that rare occasion when somebody introduces you to the work of an artist, writer, film maker or composer and their work hits you squarely between the eyes - that feeling of 'how could I possibly not have known about this person all these years?'

The reason I am mentioning this? Today is my birthday, which as far as I'm concerned means I get to be self indulgent, and fly off on a tangent that has nothing to do with my usual Last Belle posts.

Here are two painters and one writer/director who have brought me enormous inspiration over the years, but whose names often draw blank faces when I bring them up in conversation. If you don't know them then please let me introduce you to:

Giovanni Boldini (1842 - 1931)

Does this man want his paintings
to move, or what?

  

The sense of movement, of life, is amazing to me.
These are snapshot moments, captured on paper
and canvas.

And Boldini always has a wonderful,
deliberately off-kilter sense of composition
that creates a feeling of movement in the frame. 

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 - 1893)

If Ridley Scott had been born before the invention of cinema
then he would probably be making paintings like this...

I can't think of any other painter who captures light
quite so cinematically.

A fleeting moment of light captured on canvas.



Alexander Mackendrick (1912 - 1993)

One of the great film writer/directors (The Ladykillers, The Man in the White Suit, Sweet Smell of Success) but - possibly even more importantly - one of the great teachers of the craft of storytelling and directing. The collection of his teaching notes, published posthumously, as the book 'On Film-Making: an Introduction to the Craft of the Director' remains, in my opinion, the best book ever on the craft of storytelling and film directing. I've read dozens of 'how-to-direct-a-film' type books, and this is by far the best. I re-read it constantly, and get new things out of it each time.

Mackendrick directing Alec Guinness on the
set of 'The Man in the White Suit'. 

So there you have it... Happy Birthday to me... Three treats I wanted to share with you. If I'm ever feeling a bit jaded by the incessant deadlines of the commercial world, or a just a bit under-inspired, these are three of the people I turn to for a bit of vicarious mentoring.

Back to The Last Belle next time... after, perhaps, a little cake.

More... On Location

I've aquired a vast amount of photographic reference of the London landscape, collected over the fifteen years we were in and out of production on The Last Belle. It'll be interesting to see how the reference - and the film - dates as the years roll by. Already a few of the locations we referenced for background paintings have been demolished (to be replaced with the usual generic glass boxes).

This location in West London is still very much intact though...

..and inspired (with a little adaptation) this sequence.



On the other hand this location was copied more or less exactly...



... to become the flat where Rosie lives. (I never would have
thought about how the bricks under a window sill will be
darker from years of rainfall, without having referenced the
real thing first. Reference is so inspirational, whether for
creating vast landscapes or the tiniest textures.)

 I've always had huge affection for old Hollywood movies that are set in London, but which were actually shot on the backlot in California - stuff like the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series, and Disney's Mary Poppins. In the days before lightweight camera equipment, and before fast lenses and film stocks (without which you often needed huge banks of lights to supplement the natural light) there was no way of being 'on location' other than to fake it under controlled conditions. And of course most of the Hollywood tycoons loved having foreign-set films being made actually just outside their offices, where they could keep a watchful eye on them (and, more to the point, their budgets). What I like most about these fake backlot 'Londons' is how they almost entirely ignore actual geography and opt instead for a kind of archetypal landscape of how we might imagine the perfect London to be. You like Big Ben and you like Tower Bridge? Who cares if they're really a couple of miles apart - just paint them next to each other on the backdrop so they look pretty together. And maybe straighten out the river in between so we can fit St Pauls Cathedral into the nice composition too.  I don't know about anyone else, but this is pretty much how my dreams work anyway: lots of correct details but all in the wrong place.

This was the approach we applied to The Last Belle backgrounds: try and get every single detail and texture right, but feel free to move things around and resize if it suits the shot or the sequence. And the strange thing is, the more 'theatrical licence' we took the more it began to feel like the real thing.

I am now no longer sure whether I'm living in the real London, or the London that exists in the film, as both of them seem as true to me as each other. Weird.

Incidentally, before signing off,  if you too are a fan of painterly effects and cinema 'fakery' check out the wonderful Matte Shot blog, a site I regularly get lost in for several hours at a time. Enjoy.   

Press

Delivering one job and immediately starting on another, not to mention exorcizing a pernicious bugger of a computer virus, all means that I've been a bit lax recently in attending to my blog posts...

But in the meantime we've updated our main web site to include a 'Press' button where we've added some press quotes and a copy of the latest article on The Last Belle from Imagine magazine. Please take a look...

Link here and then click on the Press button

Or you can browse through other bits and bobs here at the Imagine website