Low-Tech Can Be Fun!

Back this week to the sifting of The Last Belle artwork boxes.

I've just come across some bits and bobs tucked into a folder that remind me just how much fun it can be to work in a non-digital, low-tech kind of way. Part of the brief for The Last Belle was to hand draw everything - even the technical and props stuff - so that the film would have an old-school, retro feel to it, like a 1940s cartoon.

Here's one example of how we applied 'retro thinking' to the film - During the plot of The Last Belle we establish just how much beer Wally is drinking before his date. He's always holding a can, or drinking from a can, or littering the floor with the empties. It didn't even occur to me this might cause production problems further down the line, so I merrily scribbled out storyboard panels like this:

And rough layouts of the inside of his fridge, like this:

Then came the design phase, where we got into the details of exactly how these beer cans should look...

It turns out there are very specific colours that imply 'alcohol', rather than 'soft drink'. I had never been conscious of this, but when we tried various invented colour schemes for the cans they always ended up looking like lemonade, or Coke, or something similar. The solution was to go out and buy every variety of beer can we could find and bring it back to the studio for, er, a study session.

Tough job, but somebody had to do it. All in the name of Art, etc...

And we found that, amazingly enough, there are a certain range of colours that always crop up on alcohol tins. Strange what you learn while working on a film. So we took this information - making sure our can didn't look too similar to any particular real-life brand - and applied it to our design.

My preferred method of finding colours for a specific prop, or character, in The Last Belle was to use marker pens and coloured pencils on paper, and then when I'd got something I was happy with hand it over to a Colour Modeller - in this case the brilliant Sam Spacey - to refine, and find the equivalent range of colours in cel paint, or to mix them specially.

In the meantime, while all this was going on, it suddenly dawned on me and co-layout artist Mark Naisbitt that these cans, and the lettering on them, were very labour-intensive to draw... and we had literally thousands of cans to draw: hundreds in the background layouts and thousands within the animation itself, with all that lettering and design in different sizes and perspectives throughout.

Not something that'd be a problem in the digital realm, but to hand-draw all of these thousands of cans... Nightmare!

Then came a very low-tech brainwave: I flattened out our can design, drew it on a sheet of paper, wrapped it round a real beer can, and simply photographed it from every possible angle. I took endless photos, just like these:

Then we made up several sheets of drawings, tracing from the photos (without rulers, to keep a hand-drawn feel). Mark also distorted some of the can drawings to give us scrunched up cans:

Once we'd got this library of can drawings it was fairly straightforward to photocopy them at various sizes and cut them together to create layout designs. Here's a can layout by Mark:

Here's the same layout drawing photocopied onto cel, hand painted, and shot against the background:

And here's a small section of the fridge interior:

It's all amazingly low-tech, but I found it strangely satisfying for that very reason...

Using this method we churned out the thousands of cans, with all their details, that we needed for the film. And it was fast to do.

Who needs Photoshop when you've got scissors, sticky tape, and a photocopier tucked away in the corner?

25 Years! OMG!

This week I ought to have been hunting through more Last Belle artwork boxes. But instead I've been hunting through my kitchen cupboard.

Why?

To share this with you:

It's my Who Framed Roger Rabbit mug, dating from the year the movie was released, 1988. Both the mug and the movie are celebrating their 25th anniversary!

Half the colours on this mug have been worn away by time. Even Jessica's hair has gone white with age. But amazingly the mug is still whole and uncracked, after more than 9000 fillings of tea and coffee.

The film itself is - I'm sure - slightly less faded than my mug, having had a nice new digital overhaul onto Blu Ray to celebrate it's birthday.

I've mentioned before on this blog how working on Roger Rabbit was a huge turning point in my life. It was the first movie I ever worked on professionally, the project that introduced me to my mentor Richard Williams, the film that allowed me the chance to absorb how an A-list director like Robert Zemeckis works, and the event that cemented friendships that I treasure to this day. Working on Roger Rabbit was an experience that happened such a long, long time ago - something as ancient as my faded mug - whilst at the same time feeling as immediate as if it happened yesterday - as shiny and vibrant as the re-mastered Blu-Ray.

Time is a strange substance...

Animator's App.

One of the most professionally rewarding - and happiest - two years I ever spent was working with legendary director/animator Richard Williams, and producer Mo Sutton, on 'The Animator's Survival Kit - Animated' DVD series, originally released in 2008.

Richard Williams and Neil Boyle, behind a small selection of the animated
scenes produced for 'The Animator's Survival Kit - Animated'.

When I started work on this project I had already worked with Dick Williams on commercials, and two feature films: Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Thief and the Cobbler; but more than any work I'd done before, these DVDs changed my approach to animation, and made me feel for the first time that I had a much stronger technical control over what I wanted to achieve in a scene. Animating actually became fun - a pleasurable challenge - rather than an endless, gut-twisting, sweat.

Building upon Dick's original book, we animated over 400 examples of the animator's craft, incuding timing and spacing, walks, runs, flexibility, overlapping action, weight, dialogue, and directing. Dick Williams and Mo Sutton have now taken 100 of these animated teaching examples and converted them for use as an App for the iPad. Also included in the App is a complete copy of the Expanded Edition of the Animator's Survival Kit book, and Dick's previously unreleased 9 minute animated film 'Circus Drawings'.

Sounds like a great package to me!

For more information on the App click HERE.

And here's a review on Animation Scoop.


 

Southampton Screening

A fun day today: I was invited to screen The Last Belle to an enthusiastic audience at Southampton Solent University, and afterwards did a Q&A with the students who are currently studying animation there.

It's always incredibly energising to meet students, some of whom will eventually be the 'new blood' of the industry. And it's equally inspiring for me to see how many young students still have a passion for drawn animation, and want to see it as a viable career path alongside the digital/3D technology. The magic of watching drawings that think, walk and talk, never seems to fade, generation after generation.

Thanks to Charles MacRae and the other faculty members who made me feel so welcome, and to the students for asking a bunch of very smart questions.
  

Silliness Unearthed

To make ammends for my last posting's verbal avalanche, here are a few simple sketches for you. I'm really digging back into the storage boxes now, finding earlier and earlier ideas that never made it into the final film.

In the first drafts of the script I elaborated on just how drunk Wally was getting prior to meeting his date, creating a quick montage sequence of his daily life, always with a can of beer in his hand...

Watching TV:

Cooking in the kitchen:

And.... er....

My own attempt at a perpetual motion machine.

It's silly. It's juvenile. It got cut out of the script.

But it still makes me smirk.

What We Can Learn From Pins

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was - among other things - a pioneer of political economy and the author of 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations'.

So what? you might ask. What's Adam Smith doing here, poking his intricately engraved face into this animation blog?

OK - bear with me, if you will.

Today is my birthday. So far as I'm concerned birthdays are days meant for a little self indulgence, without the guilt. On my last birthday I hijacked this very blog to share with you some of my favourite artists and film-makers. This time I want to share with you my thoughts on.... well, like I say, bear with me if you will.

One of the most famous passages in Adam Smith's book 'The Wealth of Nations' concerns an analysis of how a simple metal pin is manufactured. He figured that to make a pin requires eighteen separate processes, such as drawing out the wire, straightening it, cutting it, pointing it, grinding it to receive the head, and so on... right through to inserting the finished pin into paper, ready for sale. And he worked out that if one person sat and performed all these tasks, operating single-handedly all the necessary machinery, he could barely make more than one finished pin in a day.

But Smith noticed that if ten people were employed and were trained to specialize in just one or two of the eighteen processes that went into the making of a pin, they could collectively make forty-eight thousand pins a day, or the equivalent of four thousand eight hundred pins a day each.

The Industrial Revolution was about to be born...

Fast forward to the the early part of the twentieth century and an animator called Dick Huemer was struggling to meet his deadlines when he realised that rather than sitting down alone to produce the hundreds of drawings required for his scene he could  draw just the main poses and leave the in-between drawings to an assistant - a division of labour that radically increased the amount of animation he could produce each day. The concept of Key Drawings, Inbetweens, and the charts that showed the assistant where to place them, had been invented!

Dick Huemer

By the 1930s animation had moved from being an almost solitary pursuit to a fully industrialised process: writers, producers, directors, concept artists, layout artists, supervising animators, animators, clean-up artists, inbetweeners, and on and on, with each department becoming increasingly specialised. And now, with the development of digital animation, this process of specialisation has increased almost exponentially. Look at the lengthy credits at the end of any major CG film and you'll see a vast army of character builders, riggers, texturers, cloth simulators, hair simulators, pre-lighting technicians, and people with credits I can't even understand. A digital '3D' film now costs, on average, two and a half times more to make than the traditional hand-drawn equivalent did (even adjusting for inflation) and employs two or three times the size of crew, each person with a unique area of expertise.

There is a lot to be said for this process of industrialisation: it drives technology, creates more tools for us to use, creates jobs, and promotes a greater quantity of high quality (at least in terms of craft) films for an increasingly large audience. But there are downsides too: the more expensive movies become to make, the more likely the content will be compromised artistically; and behind the scenes, crew members can begin to feel like ever-shrinking cogs in an ever-expanding machine - each making smaller and smaller marks on a bigger and bigger canvas.

For me, this is where the fun of making a short film comes in: it'll probably take you years to complete your personal labour of love, and you'll probably lose a ton of money doing it, but it is a wonderful chance to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with all the processes that go into the making of a film. During the making of The Last Belle I had a small and wonderful crew of people bringing their talents and crafts to the project. But I also had the chance to dip my hand in everywhere and try a bit of everything. The result: I found that there is something immensely satisfying in being both the director of a project (sitting in my ivory tower, so to speak) whilst also being the guy covered in sweat and paper cuts who has to haul into storage 75 heavy boxes of artwork up a vertical ladder.

Tim Burton, commenting on his early attempts at animation, once said: What I feel really good about, really happy about, is that I did not go to film school. I went to CalArts and went through animation, where I got a very solid education. You learn design, you draw your own characters, your own backgrounds, your own scenes. You cut it, you shoot it. You learn the storyboarding process. It's everything, without the bullshit of film school...

I learnt a lot from making The Last Belle, and had tremendous fun into the bargain. So if you're reading this and you have a hankering to make your own short film - a hankering you haven't quite got around to satisfying yet - I can say this: Get To It! Go on..! Roll up your sleeves and plunge in. It'll probably take you forever, it'll probably eat up all your savings, and on several occasions you'll probably wonder why you ever began... But you surely won't regret it.

You'll bring into the world one single, and one very unique, shiny little pin all of your own.

Good luck. Get to it!

Character Design - part two

Unlike the two characters we met last week, Rosie had a somewhat tortuous birth. Possibly the reason for this is that she barely existed in my first drafts of the script: early on I had concentrated on Wally's slapstick attempts to make it to a bar to meet his date, but the date herself was very secondary to the story. She could have been anyone - I was focusing on the journey, rather than the destination. With this in mind, Rosie started out more or less as the female equivalent to Wally: a big-nosed, crude creature, with ping-pong balls for eyes.

Well, they say Like is attracted to Like...

What a delightful couple they might have made...

I even began to do a bit a storyboarding using this prototype Rosie:

But as the story began to develop I became more and more interested in her character, and what she was thinking and feeling as she sat waiting in the bar for her date to turn up. I began to redraft the script and brought in my friend Jim Maguire to help me with the writing process. Slowly, Rosie became less and less similar to Wally, and more and more his complete opposite: whereas Wally is always moving, Rosie is mostly still; Wally is always silent, Rosie is always talking; Wally doesn't think at all, Rosie thinks too much; and so on. The more sophisticated Rosie became, the more I needed a design that would allow me to display her thoughts and feelings, yet still sit within the same world, graphically. This crude design wasn't going to allow me that. So it was back to the drawing board.

I gave her some flesh colour and separated the head from the body a bit and lowered the eyes, but found this drawing horribly simplistic, ugly and unappealing...

Another in a series of endless doodles... I have dozens like this one, all different girls.

Here's a hesitant blue sketch scribbled on the corner of a piece of paper. She's got a large mouth, able to cope with the dialogue, and similar eyes to Wally. She's beginning to feel part of his 'world' graphically, but different enough as a personality. I started to feel I was getting somewhere... but she still wasn't quite right. I was starting to get very frustrated by this point.

Then, one day: I remember absent-mindedly scribbling this (above) while I was talking to a friend. I wasn't even consciously thinking about Rosie's design, and I was barely even aware my hand was doodling, but when I  noticed the sketch a few hours later I realised that I'd moved her eyeballs right to the top of her head, just like Wally's, and given her the overhanging upper lip that allows her to look permanently worried (which she is for most of the story). I can credit this doodle to my drawing hand, or some deep recess of my unconscious brain, but not to any conscious thought process. Sometimes these things just float into you, like happy dreams in the night. This was the point where I felt we had 'discovered' Rosie. Simple though this sketch is, she felt familiar to me... someone I'd be happy to spend time sketching; a rhythm of lines and curves that were a pleasure to draw.

Sometimes it takes an awful amount of effort to end up with something as simple as this.

From this point on it was a matter of playing with proportions and seeing if this face could express all the emotions I needed it to. By the time Sienna Guillory came in to record Rosie's voice I had this colour sketch to show her - still not quite right, and still a bit frumpy, but something I hoped would help Sienna visualise the character.

Once the recording session was done I used Sienna's performance to help refine Rosie's design. Not in terms of looks (I'm not a fan of trying to caricature an actor's face) but in terms of the rhythm of speech, the melody, the general feel: all this affects how the mouth works, how far it needs to open, how mobile the eyes need to be, and so on.

And it's also during this process you can try out the different costumes or hairstyles that might be required for the story:

Rosie getting ready - hair washed and towel
turban in place.

By the time the animatic drawings were complete, often in colour like the one above, I was one hundred percent comfortable with Rosie, both as a character and as a graphic design. This meant that the animation phase was a total pleasure, free from any stress. I guess this is the animation equivalent to film or theatre rehearsals: building a character, the walk, the clothes, the speech patterns, the internal thoughts, so that the end result in front of an audience appears as 'alive' and fully rounded as possible.

Final production cel of Rosie with her hair tied back.

So, in much the same way Wally struggles to find Rosie for his date, I struggled to find her at all. But find her we did.

I wonder what she's up to right now?

Oh goodness... I feel a possible sequel coming on...