A Visit From Mr Naisbitt

More trawling through the Last Belle archive has turned up some old pics of a visit to my ex-studio space from Mr Roy Naisbitt, circa 1998.



Roy Naisbitt laying out one of his huge backgrounds for the
Underground tunnel sequence in The Last Belle.

 I've detailed on this blog before (Part One HERE and Part Two HERE ) the process by which we designed this sequence. But it was always an exciting day when Roy would arrive in the studio with a new section of artwork completed, ready for me to add the character animation.

The problem was, our studio wasn't quite big enough to lay this monster out...

...so we had to snake our way through various offices, and walk the length of the building to get a feel for how the artwork was flowing.

Neil Boyle and Roy Naisbitt discuss how the
action will play out. Tracer/colour modellist
Samantha Spacey can be seen half a mile off,
at the other end of the layout... 

The arrival of one of Roy's completed backgrounds always brought the studio to a standstill, as people wandered up and down along the length of it, heads swivelling, hypnotised. And, as you would with the launch of a new ship, there was usually a bit of a celebratory drink to follow.

The day after, sitting in the peace and quiet of my office, I'd take the first section of the background, stick it on my drawing board, and stare... How on earth was I going to move my character believably through this labyrinthine perspective..?

The answer - as always - was:  go make a coffee. Have another think. Make another coffee. And when you can't put it off any longer, reach for a blank sheet of paper, reach for a nice soft pencil, and just start drawing.

It was so much fun.

(The final sequence can be seen at 10:02 here. )

Matt Groening

By strange coincidence my studio Spring Clean has just unearthed this old snapshot from 2008...

Matt Groening, Neil Boyle, Sophie and Pieter Van Houte, and Richard Williams.

  
... at the same time that production company Th1ng releases their 'official making-of' (WATCH HERE.) our Sylvain Chomet-themed Simpsons couch gag. There's also an article to accompany the video in The Beak Street Bugle.

The dinner took place at Le Petit Zinc restaurant in Annecy, France. Matt Groening was at the film festival promoting 'The Simpsons Movie' and Richard Williams was publicising 'The Animator's Survival Kit - Animated' (which is what I was working on at the time), and we all decided to get together for a slap-up meal. We had a great evening as a variety of anecdotes flew across the table. Despite Matt being beseiged by throngs of autograph hunters wherever he went - in the restaurant, on the walk back to his hotel, on the way to the toilet - he was endlessly gracious to his fans. A real gentleman, and a true artist in his philosophy of life. I really enjoyed his company.

On this evening I couldn't have guessed in a million years I would get the chance to make my own very small contribution to his legendary Simpsons show... Life is full of surprises. And some are as happy as this. 

  

Bits, Bobs, Odds and Sods

I'm having a massive spring clean in my studio, and all sorts of... stuff... is appearing from the bottom of dusty boxes. Or more likely, emerging from the pile of crap crammed down the back of my drawing board. Out of sight, out of mind...

Now here's an object you don't see much of any more:

It's a colour swatch for animation cel paint, and it's almost totally extinct. Back in the day these things cost an absolute fortune to buy because the printing of the colours on the swatch had to reflect the exact hue you were going to get in the pot of paint, with complete accuracy.

I also made up a few do-it-yourself marker-pen swatches using Pantone pens:

I used these to help select the colours for my animatic drawings:

From this we could find the equivalent colour in the cel paint range. The particularly nasty shade of orange on his Bermuda Shirt was shade 046 - just bright enough to induce migraine-blindness having painted a few hundred cels...

I can't remember how many bottles of 046 we got through, but the inch of paint you see here at the bottom is all we had left before finishing the 'shirt sequences'. The shade of yellow/orange we used for Rosie's hair ran out on the final cel. And the photocopy machine exploded and died after the last cel went through. It was all very symbolic.

Here's a final cel (from about 10:48 in the YouTube video )  which took a bunch of different colours to paint, each colour being applied to the whole sequence of cels in a run, before waiting for them to dry and applying the next colour. I'm reminded looking at this cel that I decided to save a bit of time by colouring the dark underside of his shoes, the bucket handles, and the shadow side of the brush with grey marker pens (top-cel'ing, as they used to call this, where the usual paint colour was applied to the back of the cel, and an additional 'fx' layer of pen, paint, or pencil rendering was added to the front of the cel). In this sequence the movement is so fast your eye can't detect the slightly scribbly pen texture of these areas. At least, I hope you can't...

So farewell to the Cel Paint Swatch - once outrageously expensive, now a defunct museum piece...

...although I can't quite bring myself to throw it away.

Might I need it again?

Never say never...