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.