The Last Belle

On Location

2012-02-19T15:55:00.000-08:00

As I've said before, one of my favourite parts of the film making process is research, and nothing beats switching off the anglepoise / monitor / lightbox and wandering around in the real world looking for inspiration. My co-animator Mark Naisbitt and I plunged many times into the backstreets of London searching for particular reference, and usually we did this separately, but on one particularly sunny Summer's day we took an Undeground train out to the east of London and walked back to the centre without any particular route plan. The principle reference we needed was imagery of tower blocks and a high angle shot looking over the distant cityscape so we just wandered around and followed our noses to whatever looked promising off in the distance. In the course of this journey we stumbled across many other interesting bits of architecture, brick texture, victorian tiles, crooked backstreets, amazing rooftops, street signage... and a welcoming ancient pub that refreshed us on our quest. I'm the first to admit an addiction to Google Image but nothing beats actually going to the source and seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting the actual thing. Unless your film is set on Mars, I guess.

Mark Naisbitt atop some or other building we climbed in search of...

...this cityscape, for the opening sequence.

Wandering around searching for location reference helped us in two ways (three ways if you count the health benefits of walking endless miles): firstly it gave us detailed visual reference for specifc shots we'd already come up with, and secondly it inspired stuff we wouldn't otherwise have thought about. I remember quickly scribbling out this idea for a shot featuring a zig-zagging flight of stairs:

Walking to and from work over the next few days I kept an eye out for any real location that might vaguely match this set-up, figuring that a real place could give me far more in the way of details and textures than anything I dreamt up from pure imagination. Then one lunchtime I walked past this:

And another piece of background art was born:

Other times it would be less about seeking out a specific location and more about a location creeping up on us and offering inspiration. I remember during the scripting process that I'd sketched out this idea for a shot showing Wally falling into some telephone wires and being flicked back up into the sky:

I showed this sketch to Mark and after looking at it for about three seconds he said, "There aren't any telephone wires on poles in central London."

I shrugged and replied, "Yeah well, y'know, this is a cartoon. We can have a little artistic license can't we?"

"There aren't any telephone wires on poles in central London." he repeated, frowning.

And I had to admit he had a point. But I was buggered if I could figure out how to achieve the same effect without using stretchy telephone wires. And I didn't want to lose the shot.

Then one night, a whole month or two later, I was sat in the car with my girlfriend as she drove us home along the Thames embankment, idly chatting about our day... and there it was! The answer to my problem: the Albert Bridge, lit up with a thousand fairy lights. "That's it!" I yelled out loud, nearly causing a collision.

The next day I raced back to the bridge with my camera, and trudged through the heaving, pissing rain (the downside of not using Google Image) to take this photo:

And from this we found the solution to our Falling-Into-A-Bendy-Wire problem:

Well, OK... the real lights on the real Albert Bridge aren't actually on bendy wires, but like I said, we can have a little artistic license, can't we?

The Bar

2012-02-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

I was just clearing away some boxes from around my desk at home (the drawing board is needed this weekend, thanks to a looming commercial deadline) and I came across more rough sketches of the Ripov's Bar exterior. It's funny leafing through this stuff so long after the sequence was finished - although I remember doing the final backgrounds and animating the characters I can hardly remember all the rough sketches and design ideas that preceeded them. It's like flicking through a lost diary you don't ever remember having written...

Ripov's Bar was - like all the backgrounds in the film -
inspired by a real London location. I chose this place
to give us our basic building shape, with details added
from a couple of other bars I'd spotted.

Back-of-the-envelope style scribbles, trying
to figure out two angles of Wally approaching
the exterior of the bar.

I would have doodled this while talking through
the shots with Mark Naisbitt.

Using my rough layouts, and the photo reference of real
locations, Mark begins to construct the final layout...

...piece by piece...

...even figuring out the neon lettering in perspective...

...until we have the final thing. I would then take Mark's
pristine layout, paint it, and then 'mess up' the linework by
drawing over it freehand with pencil or ink. This gave us the
hand-drawn feel, but with a solid technical structure underneath

Here's the final shot.

And the reverse angle.

I found a bunch of other doodles, sketches and photo reference in these boxes - I could easily lose an afternoon reminiscing through this stuff... but my commercial deadline is beckoning. More next time.

Welcome!

2012-01-29T14:27:00.000-08:00

A belated welcome to Cartoon Brew, and more recently to the folk at Big Screen Animation, who have been kind enough to post articles on The Last Belle - and thanks too to the people who have taken the time to leave comments. It's hard to imagine how much more difficult it must have been only a handful of years ago (before the internet, basically) for people hawking their films around festivals and trying to get a gauge of audience feedback...

...And on the subject of how much things have changed in so very few years, after my recent posts on the rostrum camera I got to thinking about some of the stories our cinematographer John Leatherbarrow has told me from his decades of experience in the business. For example, it wasn't so very long ago that all animated maps and diagrams on television were still hand drawn, hand animated with their arrows and moving dotted lines, etc, and photographed on 16mm film. As John has explained to me, for a breaking news story the artwork would have been prepared somewhere like the BBC graphics department, biked over to his rostrum facility in Soho, where he shot like a maniac (no time for mistakes or re-takes, he had to get it right first time), after which John would often leap onto his own motorbike and tear around at illegal speeds to the laboratory which would then process like crazy to develop the 16mm print, which would then be biked back to the BBC and cut to length against a voice over, and finally (presumably after telecine transfer) be broadcast, all by the skin of their teeth. And this wouldn't be an occasional bit of stress, but a daily event. It was the only way to do it then. As I say, this was not so many years ago, but it seems like a whole different age now.

At the Disney studios the amount of time between the relatively crude black and white Mickey Mouse cartoon 'Steamboat Willie' and the lush, full colour complexity of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' was a mere 9 years - an incredible period of artistic change and technical development. It feels to me like our industry has, in the last several years, been going through - is still going through - another period of incredible change and development. This is a very exciting time to be sitting at our drawing boards, syntiques, or monitors. Even for people like me who want to bring a few of the more archaic techniques along for the ride.

Photography - part 3

2012-01-22T15:23:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in part one of these recent posts on Photography, I got the idea to colour-code each of the locations featured in The Last Belle from watching old silent movies - in fact, I remember the idea dropping into my head while watching Broken Blossoms (made in 1919 by D.W. Griffith) where the black and white photography had been tinted afterwards so that the interior of a fire-lit shack was tinted a warm orange/red colour, while the exterior night scenes were tinted with blue. As there is a lot of cross-cutting between locations in The Last Belle I figured that slightly tinting each location would help distinguish exactly where we are within a fraction of a second of the cut, meaning we could concentrate on what the characters were doing rather than continually having to establish where we are geographically.

Most of this work was done by John Leatherbarrow in-camera as he shot the film, either by gelling the lights and/or the lens itself. After all the footage was shot and edited we both sat down with Paul Dean, a terrific grading artist at Deluxe Soho, and made final tweaks and adjustments to the colours.

All the footage set in the Underground tunnels was tinted
green. I had noticed in all of Roy Naisbitt's reference photos of
the Underground that the fluorescent lights created a green'ish
cast on the film, so we replicated this - it also lent a slightly
nauseous feeling to the sequence which seemed appropriate as
Wally is fuelled by too much beer at this point in the story.

More green'ish tinting in the Underground. As with the previous
picture, John could isolate areas with mattes to control the lighting.
In this frame the area beyond the top of the escalator has been lit up to
help highlight Wally as he tumbles down the steps. In the previous
photo the headlights of the train have been burnt in separately.

The sequences set in the bar where Rosie sits waiting were tinted
with a pink cast. To help create an 'evening' feeling I was keen to
have a lot of neon lighting in the scenes. Mark Naisbitt created the
mattes for the neon, which John then backlit and burnt into the negative.

The bar clock features quite heavily in the story. John created
another lovely neon glow around the clock face for these shots.
Although it's perfectly possible to create diffuse lighting effects
like this digitally, for me there is nothing quite like shining real
light through a real lens onto real film emulsion...

For this shot of the 'London Eye' I asked John to create the
effect of the wheel being lit from below, as if the structure is so
big that the light at the bottom can't quite reach to the top. None
of these effects exist in the artwork itself, but were all created with
mattes and lighting.

More multipule exposure camera effects: the rain, rain splashes,
and subtle reflection of the cityscape in the glass were all built
up one exposure at a time, so that you 'feel' them there without the
effects distracting too much attention away from the character.

One of the things I like most about working with John is that for all his technical knowledge what he's most interested in is the 'feel' you are after. After discussing a sequence for some time he would often just cut to the chase and ask me, "What exactly do you want to feel in this shot?" Once we had established that, then he was free to develop things at a technical level, and work his magic in the depths of the dark, dungeon-like camera room.

Photography - part 2

2012-01-16T00:24:00.000-08:00

Here's another of our day-for-night shots, from rough sketch to final shot:

One of the important locations in The Last Belle is 'Ripov's' bar, where our main character Rosie sits and waits for her dream date to turn up. When we were developing the script I couldn't get a clear image in my mind of what the bar would look like from the outside, and how we could get it to stand out from the surrounding row of shops and restaurants of a typical London street. Then one day I was wandering through town when I spotted a pub situated between two intersecting streets, with its door placed in the corner. I grabbed a camera, took some reference photos, and this became the basis of Ripov's exterior.

Here's a rough sketch of the bar exterior. We were trying to find
a low angle that would allow Rosie's tottering high heels to pass
by close to the camera.

Producer Rebecca Neville also contributed some artwork early
on in the production. Here she's drawing up a rough layout,
enlarged from the previous sketch so that more detail can be added.

The final layout, with its details, was reduced in size on a photocopier
to a standard 16 field so that the character animation did not have to be
drawn huge. I painted the final background in daytime colours,
except for the dark blue night sky.

With the background artwork complete, Mark Naisbitt created
a series of mattes with which cameraman John Leatherbarrow
could control the lighting of different areas. Here are the exterior lamps...

These are the bar windows. For continuity, these mattes would
be exposed onto the film using the same pink gel we used to
tint the interior bar scenes.

These are the upstairs windows...

...In the case of these windows, rather than colouring them with
camera gels I used yellow marker pen on paper, rendered with
a diffuse orange pencil graduation, all of which was placed behind
the matte and backlit.

And finally, the matte for the neon sign above the door. Yellow,
red and green gels were placed behind the matte to create the
different coloured neon.

When all this artwork was ready, and the character cels complete, John shot a series of tests. These would test the overall exposure of the background itself, the degree of blue cast we would use for the night-time effect, and the individual exposures for each of the mattes used to burn in the neon and other lights, as well as any other effects such as diffusion. When we had settled on the lighting effects and exposures, John would do the actual shoot, running the film through the camera for each element, and then rewinding and starting at frame one again to burn in the next element. In the case of this shot, he would also have to re-run all the character cels with each pass so that the character would block out the areas of the matte that it was passing in front of (if you don't do this the lights will shine through the character making her look transparent).

Here's the final composite image after all the lighting runs.
(For this shot the upstairs window matte has not been used.)

Rosie steps past the camera...

...and adjusts herself, ready for her big date.

I tip my hat to John and his amazing patience in building up our shots in this way. (And, as if the job isn't hard enough already, most camera rooms are usually situated in the depths of a basement, sealed from all natural light, and sealed from the rest of the human race too: one mis-timed interruption could ruin a shot.) Glamorous, or sociable, it isn't. But the end results can be magic.

Photography - part one

2012-01-09T00:15:00.000-08:00

Before the dawn of the digital age there was only one way to get your drawings onto the screen and that was by photographing them one frame at a time on a rostrum camera.

The rostrum comprised a motion picture camera pointing down at a table onto which the artwork could be placed and held flat under a hinged sheet of glass. The artwork could be panned incrementally to the left or right, up or down, and in rotation, and the camera could slide up or down, away or towards, the artwork to create a zoom effect.

Some of the cameras modified for rostrum work date back to
the Hollywood of the 1930s, or even earlier. The mechanisms were
so beautifully and solidly crafted that they still run smoothly today.

For 70 or 80 years this method of photographing animation artwork remained essentially the same, with a few developments along the way: for example, multiplane levels to create depth, or polarising filters to eradicate the appearance of dust and dirt on the cel artwork, or the introduction of early computer technology to control the incremental movements of the camera and artwork table (much like the 'motion control' technology developed for the original Star Wars).

John Leatherbarrow programming a camera move. Although the
computer is ancient, and probably less powerful than your average
modern wristwatch, it still does the job!

Every frame of The Last Belle was photographed on 2 rostrum cameras operated by John Leatherbarrow.
So far as I'm concerned John was, and is, the best in the business. He's worked on a huge variety of projects, starting out by photographing Terry Gilliam's animated title sequence for 'Cry of the Banshee', followed by hundreds, if not thousands, of television and film commercials, as well as supervising all the rostrum camera work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit where he helped Richard Williams and Chris Knott develop the 'tone matte' technique which created the effect of 3-dimensional shadows on the 2-dimensional character artwork. John also created many of the painterly lighting effects used in Richard Williams' The Thief and the Cobbler, and it was this use of lighting that particularly interested me for The Last Belle.

John Leatherbarrow and Neil Boyle.

One of my early ideas for The Last Belle was to 'colour code' each of the locations in the film (inspired by the tinting of black and white silent movies) so that as we cross-cut between the various locations it is instantly recognisable where we are. The traditional way of doing this would be to create these colour effects in the artwork itself so that, for example, a night-time location would be painted using blacks and blues, and the character cels would be painted in the blue range as well, creating the effect of everything being lit by inky blue moonlight. What I wanted to do was the opposite: paint the whole film in the standard 'neutral' colours of flat daylight, and use John's expertise to really light this artwork and create the correct tonal feel.

As an example, here's the artwork for one of our shots:

This is a piece of panning background artwork, drawn by
Mark Naisbitt and painted by me, using daylight colours.

Here's a wheelie-bin colour model, also painted in
daylight colours.

This is the final effect after John has lit the artwork: stylised moonlight!

By re-exposing the film in several passes, different effects can be built up. The above example is a fairly simple two-run pass, with the film exposed once with blue lighting to achieve the overall effect, and then once again with mattes to burn in the yellow/orange glow of the basement windows. Using this technique, with each run of the film different colour gels can be used on the lights and/or the camera lens, different exposures can be used to create bright or dark areas within the frame, and various filters can be used to create a variety of effects, for example a diffusion filter to create a soft-edged glow around a bright area. Building up a photographic image this way is truly 'painting with light'; the real magic of it for me is that the final effect on screen can be so different to the actual artwork you hold in your hand - an image of a place that exists only in the emulsion of the film.

London Calling

2012-01-02T14:54:00.000-08:00

We are thrilled to announce The Last Belle will be screening as part of the 'London Calling' festival in Paris, a celebration of 100 films, old and new, set in and around London, including feature films from Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Michael Winterbottom, and a programme of animated shorts compiled by Jayne Pilling.

For more information on the festival click here.

And for more information on the animation programme click here.

Happy Christmas!

2011-12-23T15:44:00.000-08:00

Happy Christmas to those of you who celebrate it!

Hot off the press, here's a new article about The Last Belle from Skwigly online animation magazine.

Hand Lettering

2011-12-18T14:10:00.000-08:00

I love how the opening titles to a film can really set the tone for what is about to follow, even if we are not really conscious of the fact most of the time. My brief to everyone working on The Last Belle was to produce a traditional style cartoon but placed in a modern day setting, so when I started to think about the titles I wanted something that echoed that idea: something that had overtones of classic 1940s cartoon text, but with a slightly modern twist.

Mark Naisbitt at work.

Mark Naisbitt was the perfect choice to develop the fonts we needed as he is one of the few hand-lettering artists still left around, as well as an animator, layout artist, and technical draughtsman. Mark was trained by Raymond Guillaumet (both worked at Richard Williams' studio); Raymond did much of the lettering and technical animation at Dick's studio, and prior to that had worked on the lettering for many feature films including the early James Bond movies as well as the infamous 'floating lettering' sequence at the beginning of Barbarella.

For The Last Belle Mark started by looking at the classic Tom and Jerry cartoons because I really liked the style of lettering they had: classic 1940s cartoon style, encased in a bold white outline. I wanted to combine that with the yellow to orange graduation effect within the letters often employed in action-adventure titles like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future. This was our jumping off point and Mark started to sketch around these ideas.

Once we'd got into a style that we both felt comfortable with Mark developed the exact structure of how each letter would be formed. This took quite a bit of tinkering because each individual letter had to work not only by itself, but also within the context of those around it - and sometimes letters would work together very pleasingly while spelling out the name of the title, but not so well spelling out the name of an actor. This is the amazing craft of font design and proportion, and there are a whole host of rules, and occasions where you can break those rules, which are beyond any training I have - this kind of stuff isn't generally taught in Art Schools any more. Because of this I loved peering over Mark's shoulder as he pieced the fonts together, using a combination of maths, geometric proportion, technical drawing, and simple 'taste'.

Beginning to form the structure of 'Last'.

Underlying circles define the curves of the 'S', pushing it
slightly above and below the height of the other letters. For
some reason this always feels more balanced to the eye.

Constructing the 'E'

I wanted the last 'e' of 'Belle' to be in lower case so that
the word could be read as 'Bell' and 'Belle' - a word-play
reflecting the plot of the film.

The final artwork, inked with technical pens onto cel, painted,
and backed by a graduated colour card, rendered with coloured
pencils and marker pens.

The opening title as it appears in the film.

Amanda Donohoe's credit was tough for Mark to balance as
it is fairly unusual to have three alternate 'O' letters in a row.

A close-up of some of the construction. All this effort should
result in something that looks clean, clear and completely effortless!

The back of the final painted cel, with its black surround
and white edges. The interior shape of the surname has been
left clear to reveal the graduated colour that will be added beneath.

The final set up, ready for filming. I chose purples and blues
inside the actor's credits as they immediately precede a storm
sequence featuring a similar colour range.

There is no denying that hand lettering takes a long time, but the great thing is that you can design bespoke fonts to reflect the exact style of your film, and you can balance them far better than a computer does when it's working on auto-pilot. On the other hand, I was extremely grateful that we could use a computer to generate the roller credits at the end of the film as this would have taken an age to hand letter, and it would have been a nightmare to make last minute changes and additions to (which we had to). As ever it's horses for courses: vive la difference!

Tracing

2011-12-04T13:03:00.000-08:00

Tracing is a demanding craft, and one that has practically died out in the digital environment. The skill of the tracer was to accurately and sensitively trace with a dip pen onto cel the pencil lines of the original animation drawing. The lines had to appear fluid, with no stop and start blobs, and the thickness of the line could be controlled across a curve by varying the pressure and angle of the nib. Often the linework on the cels would be made up from several different colours and the final effect could be beautifully painterly (think Pinocchio, or Sleeping Beauty, or the original footage from The Thief and the Cobbler). The best of the tracers were, of course, astonishingly accurate.

Sam Spacey at work on cels of Rosie

Sam Spacey has been involved with The Last Belle since the very beginning, helping to choose colours for the characters and props, as well as painting cels and - most importantly - being the sole tracer on the project. I first met Sam on Richard Williams' feature The Thief and the Cobbler where, at the very young age of 18, she had already become one of the best tracers in the studio. If I'd animated a scene with particularly subtle movement, or a character close up, I would always request that Sam trace it; animators would often fight over who was going to trace their scenes!

One of Sam's jobs on The Last Belle was the mind-numbing task of hand tracing Wally's shirt pattern as it turns and twists through perspective.

Animation clean up of Wally prior to being traced.

The original character drawings were cleaned up in ink using a felt-tip calligraphy pen (if we made a mistake we had to scalpel out the offending area and stick in a new piece of paper). Then the shirt pattern was animated using a non-photocopy blue pencil. Once this had been inbetweened and finished up by assistant animator Bella Bremner the drawings were photocopied onto cel (which reproduced only the black ink lines around the character but couldn't 'see' the light blue lines), and then these cels were handed over to Sam for the tracing of the shirt pattern in blue ink onto the cel.

Another animation clean up, this time from the tunnel sequence
discussed in previous posts...

... and some final traced and painted cels.

A frame from the final sequence, shot against its background.

This was a pretty long-winded process but it gave exactly the look I was trying to achieve. I have no idea though how many hundreds of thousands of individual flowers and leaf fronds were animated, traced and painted to complete all the frames featuring Wally's tasteless shirt. Seemed like a funny idea at the time...

Sam Spacey, tracer par excellence!

Trailer

2011-11-29T13:59:00.000-08:00

For anyone who hasn't visited our main web site you may have missed that The Last Belle teaser trailer is now up and running. You can visit it at You Tube.

And - briefly diverting off The Last Belle for a moment - I just noticed something else on You Tube... A few months back while I was wading through some complicated post-production, I was wondering why it was that nobody seemed to make those simple, but effective, looking TV ads any more - the ones that I gather used to be so popular in the 50's, 60's, 70's and early 80's, featuring a character just doing its stuff against a white screen, usually with no cuts; just straightforward character animation. It was a style that seemed to have more or less died out. And then a couple of days later I got a call from director Dan Greaves at Tandem Films asking if I'd like to animate exactly that: a new 20 second ad featuring a simple line character doing its stuff against a white screen. A wish come true! It was enormous fun to do, a real animator's holiday - you can watch it here.

Performance

2011-11-23T16:40:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Sienna Guillory who tweeted The Last Belle website yesterday, live from the set of her latest movie 'Resident Evil: Retribution'.

Sienna Guillory, who performs the voice
of Rosie in The Last Belle.

I became aware of Sienna's work back in 2000 when she starred in the brilliant BBC adaptation of Kingsley Amis' 'Take A Girl Like You' (still inexplicably unavailable on DVD... come on, BBC). Since then I have watched her appear, chameleon-like, in an amazing variety of roles, starring in mega-budget action films, micro-budget short films, historical drama, futuristic drama, comedy, episodic television, theatre.... and now our animated cartoon. Or, as Sienna describes herself at the top of her tweets: "Sometime school teacher, assassin, elf warrior, stripper, zombie killer, robot... Full time mother of twins."

It's amazing how versatile modern actors have to be, navigating all the modern technology of a movie set, as well as green screen, virtual sets, invisible co-stars who won't be added until post-production, performance capture technology, and goodness knows what else. And in the case of voice recording for animation there's almost nothing to work with, except a small soundproof room, a microphone, and lots of imagination.

I don't think anyone realises just how hard it is to act under these circumstances until they try it themselves. Case in point: during the recordings for Last Belle I would occasionally step into the recording booth to feed ('off camera') lines for the actor to respond to. When our editor Ivan Naisbitt cut all the dialogue together he made an additional little treat for me: a whole tape where he cut out all the actor's proper lines and kept in just the stuff of me feeding lines 'off camera'. Now, I knew I'd never make it as an actor, but nothing could have prepared me for just how excruciating my 'performance' was! The whole editing department fell about laughing while I tried to hide in a corner. And from that moment to this I've been very happy to disguise myself behind pencil and paper characters and vent all my performing urges through them. Animation is a great way of showing off to an audience while actually hiding behind a drawing board in the attic. Suits me.

I lived with these character voices for several years (Aaaagh - the voices in my head! ) as we slowly pieced The Last Belle together frame by frame, and remained inspired by the performances throughout - thanks to Sienna, Amanda Donohoe and Colin McFarlane who are all (unlike me) wonderfully versatile actors.

Roy Naisbitt - part 2

2011-11-20T12:38:00.000-08:00

Roy at work on a Last Belle background

In the late summer of 1996 I'd just finished jetting back and forth between London and Los Angeles for a year and a half, directing sequences on the Warner Bros. feature film Space Jam. We were all exhausted when that movie wrapped so I decided to take a break from commercial production for a while and concentrate on my own work ... and so The Last Belle was conceived. For The Last Belle I wanted to get Roy Naisbitt involved from day one so we could develop a sequence together; but when I say 'together' I really wanted to give Roy free reign to let his pencil run with an idea, unrestricted by commercial considerations or 'client's comments'. Pure, undiluted, Roy.

One of Roy's concept drawings for the Moron Mountain sequence in Space Jam.

I'd always loved the brief flashes of Roy's imagination in the Maroon Cartoon at the beginning of Roger Rabbit, and the travelling camera shots in Richard Williams' oscar winning version of A Christmas Carol and I began to wonder what would it be like if one of these crazy perspective shots lasted not just 4 or 5 seconds, but kept going on... and on... for more than a minute?

My brief to Roy for the Underground Tunnel Sequence in The Last Belle (outlined in part 1) was simple:
1) When our drunk character falls down the steps he should plummet like he's just stepped out of an aeroplane at 20,000 feet.
2) As soon as he's dropped we (the audience) should lose all sense of what is up and what is down.
3) He needs to splat into a column at the end, and,
4) The whole shot should last roughly one minute.
Other than these four points I wanted Roy to feel free to take the sequence in whichever direction he wanted.

Roy set to work immediately, but not - as I might have imagined - at the drawing board. To begin with he started doing research. Lots and lots of research. In fact an amazing amount of research. First he took a small camcorder down into some real Underground tunnels and staggered around with the camera as if he were drunk (doubtless to the amusement of passers-by). Then we reviewed the point-of-view footage, taking sections of it and speeding it up or slowing it down to see what it felt like. Then Roy took a stills camera and photographed a variety of different stations, each with a different style of architecture. And then he photographed every possible detail that might be of use: handrails, tiles, lights, mirrors, signs, rivets and textures. From this he made up a comprehensive scrapbook of images which we both pored over and discussed. He then took all these images, all these choices, put them to one side, and for the first time reached for a pencil.

This amount of research should not have been a surprise to me because anyone who has trained under Richard Williams will be familiar with it. Even on a very, very tight schedule I've known Dick to spend days collecting research before he goes anywhere near a pencil, and although in the meantime the producers and the clients might be going crazy with worry that nothing appears to be happening, and nothing appears to be getting done, Dick would always then sit down at the drawing board and - fully loaded with information - start drawing faster, and more decisively, than you can imagine. Just so with Roy.

One afternoon Roy and I met up and decided the time was right to get going on designing this shot. Here's what happened: once Roy had absorbed and put aside the reference he laid out a long roll of cheap lining paper across the floor of his studio and, using a soft piece of charcoal, began to score long arcing lines down the length of it.

"OK. Here are the stairs. They're gonna drop down probably something like this." Swish! Swish! A six foot section of paper was filled in seconds with loose lines - no details, no steps indicated, just rhythmic swooshes.

"What do you think?" Roy asked me, and turned back to consider it himself. Then he added, "I think it needs to be longer."

So he tore out the last half of the drawing, discarded it, and re-attached the blank roll of paper to the start of the drawing again. Swish! Swish! Longer swooping lines. The sticking tape and the paper were covered in charcoal finger marks and there were footprints along the drawing where Roy was pacing the length of it, extending the lines, unrolling more of the blank paper. This was the closest thing to a sculptural process I'd ever seen while someone was drawing. It was physical and it was energetic.

Once Roy had got a good length of the drawing sketched out he began to pace along it, cupping his hands to approximate the area the camera would eventually see. He thought it looked pretty good and got me to pace the length of it too. A few horizontal lines were added in to loosely indicate steps, and an approximation of tiles on the wall. But still to an onlooker, outside of this process, there would be little sense of the actual environment Roy was drawing; at this stage the drawing was almost symbolic of the feeling of falling, but not of an actual, structural place.

Over the following weeks Roy sketched out tighter and tighter versions of this layout, starting in coloured pencil, then graphite and finally ink. We took each of these versions and shot them, however crudely, on a video linetester, panning and rotating them under the camera to find the right speed to move over them, and all the while I was imagining how the character was going to move through this space -an interesting animation challenge as I'd have to animate the character as if he were motivating the camera move, even though the camera move would have been finalised before I even began to start drawing the character. With each pass the structure became more and more solid and details began to emerge.

The inked version of a section of background.
The artwork for the first 12 seconds of the shot alone was 35 feet long.

The camera information, which shows the lens centre and field size for
every frame of the movement.

It finally dawned on me that one of the things that makes Roy's work so unique is that he works the opposite way to many other layout artists. Rather than starting with a basic structure, a basic perspective grid, and building details up over it, Roy starts with a feeling, develops it in a kinetic way, and only afterwards tries to shoehorn the laws of perspective to it. The end result is something that appears solid and logical (Roy originally trained as a carpenter, so he understands structure brilliantly), but which is actually built upon the foundations of a dream.

John Leatherbarrow and Roy discuss how to shoot the artwork. John would
often have to repeat the camera moves several times so that different lighting
effects could be built up onto the film negative.

Roy, with typical modesty, just claims that his drawings come out so weird because he never had a formal art school training, and therefore doesn't know all the correct rules of perspective! Whatever the case, getting to work with a visionary artist is one of the biggest kicks a director can have, and certainly one of the privileges of the job. I finally got to help create one of Roy's pieces of art, and had the chance to animate across and through its unique perspectives. Thanks Roy.

Roy Naisbitt - intermission

2011-11-13T10:12:00.000-08:00

Before getting onto part 2 of my post on Roy, a quick intermission about the Bradford Animation Festival from which I've just returned.

The National Media Museum, home of the Bradford Animation Festival.

We had a terrific two hour slot within the festival, framed around Fraser MacLean's new book 'Setting the Scene'. Fraser gave a passionate talk about the importance of the animation layout process, and it's history, before introducing Scott Caple onto the stage. Scott took us through a selection of his intricate layout and design drawings for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Incredibles, before I went up on stage with Roy to briefly talk through his layout work on The Last Belle. Then we rounded it all off with a screening of the film.

We had a fantastically enthusiastic audience, and many came up afterwards to chat, and ask questions of Scott and Roy, while Fraser signed copies of his book. Thanks to everyone who came to talk with us, and to Deb Singleton and all her super-efficient festival staff. It's always energising to be surrounded by so many people who are passionate about the craft of animation, and of film in general.

Scott, Fraser and Roy

It was great too to see that the festival hosted a screening of the works of animation director Geoff Dunbar, and awarded him a well deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. I had the pleasure of working with Geoff a few years back on the animated short 'Tuesday', for which Geoff directed and Paul McCartney produced and scored. Geoff's a brilliantly talented guy, and he has the funniest stories I've ever heard about the London animation scene between the 1970s to the present day... many of which are unrepeatable. Top man.

Geoff Dunbar... homeward bound.

Roy Naisbitt - part 1

2011-11-06T17:11:00.000-08:00

To tie in with the release of the book 'Setting the Scene' and its forthcoming promotion at the Bradford Film Festival (see previous post) I thought it would be a good time to discuss the work of layout legend Roy Naisbitt. (For anyone not familiar with traditional animation terminology, the layout artist creates the 'view' that the camera is seeing, including the scenery behind and around the characters.)

Roy Naisbitt

When I began working on The Last Belle I wanted to create a sequence in which our drunk character, Wally, trips up at the top of some stairs leading to a London Underground train station and tumbles down them, past the ticket office, down the escalators, smashing through a NO ENTRY sign into a disused tunnel, out again, and finally down to platform level where he splats into a column. I wanted to achieve this in one take - no cuts - but I didn't want to use computer graphics and I didn't want to hand animate the architecture changing perspective either. To complement the character's drunken state I wanted to use very distorted perspectives hand drawn onto great lengths of paper and photographed frame by frame by a camera zooming in, out and rotating along the length of it; a kind of two-and-a-half dimensional effect. In other words a perfect job for the master of unusual perspective and camera moves - Roy Naisbitt.

The Underground Tunnel sequence

But before getting down to the nitty-gritty of this sequence, and of Roy's working methods, bear with me on a little personal history: how I was lucky enough to meet up with, and finally work with, Roy himself.

When I was a 14 year old schoolkid - back sometime in the early 1980s - I was very hungry to learn about animation, so I wrote to the many animation studios in London asking for advice on how to become a professional animator. Some studios ignored my requests and others replied with a few dribbles of help, but what amazed me was that the Richard Williams Animation studio - one of the busiest, the most award laden, and in many ways the most out of reach to a teenage schoolkid - was in fact the studio that offered me the greatest encouragement. Over the next couple of years the studio staff endured my naive scribbles and amateur animation tests until finally, one summer holiday, they offered me the chance to come in for a couple of weeks as a relief runner so I could see how the place operated. One of my first errands was to be asked by a bloke called Roy Naisbitt if I could run out and buy him some wood glue. I figured Roy must be some kind of maintenance guy at the studio - only later did I discover that Roy was not only Dick Williams' right hand man, but also an amazing artist, and the guy who would build shelves and fix stuff up at the studio. When my two weeks of work was up Roy very kindly gave me some old bits of animation paper to do some tests with and some words of encouragement, and off I went.

Moving on a few years, I had enrolled in what turned out to be a disastrous college course in animation. On my first day, and within a few minutes of arriving, I found a kindred spirit - another aspiring character animator called James Baxter. With no prospect of there being any teaching of how to actually animate on this so-called 'animation course' we set each other tests, shot them in the evenings and on weekends using the downtime on college equipment, and then tried to critique each other's work in an attempt to self-teach. We'd got about one minute's worth of animation together when we heard a rumour about a new film called 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' which was still recruiting artists. We ran - literally - to the studio base in London's Camden Town district, handed in our unfinished videotape of animation, and were hired the next week as inbetweeners. By a sheer twist of fate both Richard Williams and Disney animator Andreas Deja were looking for new animation assistants at the same time we arrived on the scene. Andreas took on James, and I started with Dick.

By working with a Master of the craft like Dick I was privileged to begin getting the most amazing education in animation anyone could wish for - and I finally got to work with Roy on a professional level too, as we were all working on the opening 'Maroon Cartoon' sequence which had many examples of Roy's crazy perspectives.

Roy and Steven Spielberg on 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit', in 1987

But by the time I got to work on these shots Roy had already prepared the layouts and the animating backgrounds, and I couldn't figure out how he'd worked some of the stuff out. I'd ask him, "How'd you come up with that way of achieving this effect?" and Roy would shrug and say, "I dunno, I just did something..." I couldn't figure out if Roy was genuinely doing everything instinctively, or if he was just very, very modest and didn't like talking about it too much, but I became determined to figure out Roy's work method.

After Roger Rabbit finished Dick invited me to work on his (then unfinanced) feature 'The Thief and the Cobbler', promising me there was enough cash to keep me employed for a couple of months. In the end I stayed on the film for 4 years - an amazing period of time during which Dick really pushed the few skills I already had, and patiently taught me many, many more. And all the time I was still trying to figure out what it was that made Roy's layout work so unique...

Roy preparing a 'Thief and the Cobbler' background in 1990

Once again, by the time one of Roy's layouts reached my lightbox his creative work had been done - and I was none the wiser as to how he'd arrived at his decisions. I began to figure, the only way I'm going to participate in the birth of one of these layout sequences is to direct my own film and get Roy involved from day one..!

And so that's what I did. (To be continued...)

A Feast of Layouts

2011-10-30T03:42:00.000-07:00

After years of research and dedication Fraser Maclean's new book 'Setting the Scene - The Art and Evolution of Animation Layout' is out now. The Last Belle is included inside as part of the material on Roy Naisbitt's legendary work at the layout desk, including some of his previously unpublished roughs and final background work from 'The Thief and the Cobbler' and 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit'.

As part of the promotion for the book Fraser, Roy and Pixar layout maestro Scott Caple will be giving a talk at the Bradford Animation Festival on Saturday 12th November, and we'll have The Last Belle there too as an example of Roy's latest work.

To link to the festival click here
To link to Fraser's book on Amazon UK click here
To link to Fraser's book on Amazon USA click here

Thanks

2011-10-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

These blogs are a great way of posting information, but they're annoyingly set up to make it difficult to respond to individual comments. So to those who have posted nice things about The Last Belle, and to those who have spoken to us after the London Film Festival screenings : Thank You!

John Leatherbarrow, Jim Maguire (co-writer), Neil Boyle,
Lyn and Roy Naisbitt at the London Film Festival (photo by Ed Roberts)

And in reply to a recent post asking where we will be screening next... watch this space! We have some more festivals being lined up here in the UK, and some more planned for various locations around the world. As soon as we have confirmation of any screening I'll post it here.

2011-10-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

The Last Belle has just finished its final screening tonight at The London Film Festival where we had the pleasure of being part of a programme of shorts including new work by Barry Purves and Spike Jonze. Thanks to everyone at the festival for making us so welcome.

The National Film Theatre tonight, lit up against the Thames

Crew Screening

2011-10-19T15:59:00.000-07:00

The Last Belle had its first screening last week in front of an audience of crew members and friends, and a very happy evening it was. In keeping with the theme of 'old and new' that keeps recurring in all aspects of The Last Belle, the audience ranged from 3 to 81 years of age. Once the younger ones had been tucked up in bed, the older ones headed to Soho's 'The Dog and Duck' to help wet the film's head. Here are a few pictures from the night (photos by Simon Maddocks)

Upstairs at The Dog and Duck

Rod Howick (voice breakdown), Bella Bremner (sole assistant animator on The Last Belle)
and Roy Naisbitt (legend, and layout artist)

Mark Naisbitt (animator) and Rebecca Neville (producer)

Brian Stevens (one of the great names from British
animation and a great friend too)

Tanya Fenton (who patiently endured 4 or 5 years of being my assistant
animator at Richard Williams studio) and John Cousen (who ran
the Effects Department at the Williams studio)

Mark Naisbitt and Neil Boyle (director/animator)

Roy Naisbitt, Sam Spacey (tracer) and Angeline De Silva (painter)

The editing department: Chris Richmond (editor), Ivan Naisbitt (chief editor)
Mark Naisbitt, and Paul Naisbitt (editor)

Web Site

2011-10-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

The web site for The Last Belle is now up and running at http://www.thelastbelle.com/, or you can click here. We hope to have a teaser trailer soon too...

Lozenge

2011-10-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

At the start of the project I decided we needed to come up with an appropriately chunky 1970s style wallpaper design for our taste-challenged character Wally. In order to research this I ended up with co-animator and layout artist Mark Naisbitt in the vaults of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Tucked away inside this labyrinthine building are endless examples of material, clothes, decor and assorted design from across the centuries, including massive tomes of wallpaper samples through which we were allowed to leaf with gloved hands, as if they were ancient religious texts. More and more volumes were brought up from the bowels of the building and wheeled towards us on trolleys. We spent a whole afternoon poring over this stuff - thousands and thousands of designs lovingly stored for history. Mark sketched several ideas based on the 'feel' of the period we had chosen, and finally we agreed on a new design. Mark christened the design 'Lozenge'.

This is 'Lozenge'...

...and here it is multiplied up.

Back at the studio Mark spent some time hand-drawing the design - with a little help from a photocopier - into a variety of perspectives so that we could 'wallpaper' the various angles of shot needed.

With subtle perspective...

...and more extreme.

Here's the final shot: a drunk's-eye-view of the wall clock.

Researching stuff like this is one of my favourite parts of the film making process - it takes you to places you probably wouldn't otherwise go, and introduces you to people you might not otherwise meet; and it's a chance to get away from the usual - sitting in a slightly darkened room staring into a monitor or a lightbox.

Making the Grade

2011-09-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

After almost exactly 15 years of on-and-off work on The Last Belle we have now completed the final piece of the film making puzzle: grading the image to get correct and consistent colours and light levels. As many of the sequences in the film have been shot years apart in time, and in different locations using different cameras, the grading process irons out these inconsistencies. It also allows you to control the colour and mood of a scene.

The grading has been done at Deluxe Soho by Paul Dean with the whole digital post production process overseen by the wonderfully helpful Martin Bullard and Toby Glover.

As I've been wandering in and out of this modern, cutting-edge facility I've been looking at the row of beautiful 18th century townhouses right opposite. It's an appropriate location to wrap up production on The Last Belle: a project begun with paper, pencil, paint and film, but finished in an entirely digital environment. Old and new, side by side.

Credits

2011-09-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

You know when you go to leave your house in the morning and just as you're about to close the door you run back in to check the gas on the oven is switched off... then you go to leave again and think did I really check properly? so you run back in again... and so on? This is what producing end credits is like. You've checked and checked and checked but still there's that niggling feeling someone - someone really important - has been left off by mistake. Even though you know they haven't. Probably.

Kirk Hendry producing The Last Belle roller credits.

The final - we hope - titles and credits have been put together by Kirk Hendry, who's also been supervising a lot of other digital work in support of the film. Kirk's brilliant short film Junk is currently touring the festivals to much acclaim. You can check out the web site for Junk here.

Final Mix

2011-09-21T16:08:00.000-07:00

The final sound mix has been completed by Ben Carr at sound production company art4noise.

Kabooom!

Animation presents an interesting challenge for a sound designer as they are starting with a completely blank canvas - utter silence. Apart from the pre-recorded actor's voices there are no production sounds at all: no footsteps, no wind, no rustle of shirt sleeves or thud of flesh as it hits the deck. Everything has to be created from scratch and that leaves a lot of leeway in how you approach the tone of your film. Cartoony? Naturalistic? Minimalist? Hyper-Realistic?

For The Last Belle art4noise sound designer Nick Baldock and supervising sound editor Peter Baldock designed our sound with a kind of heightened reality, using 95% natural sounds, but sometimes emphasized in subtle ways or used in unusual contexts. Once they had built up the soundscape every noise had to be placed spatially and then mixed together with the score and the dialogue so that we hear what we need to hear, when we need to hear it.

Sound mixer Ben Carr

With the mix now complete there's one thing I'm certain about: if you're drawing a character falling over, no matter how hard you work on getting the illusion of weight into your animation, it's the correct choice of THUD on the soundtrack that'll make you actually feel the pain...

More Scoring Pictures

2011-09-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

Here are a few more pictures from the recording of The Last Belle score. Photos by Kirk Hendry.

Ah! I was expecting you Mr Bond: The Slovak Radio Building

Recording in session

Conductor David Hernando Rico

Director Neil Boyle

World Premiere

2011-09-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

Appropriately enough for a film set in London, The Last Belle will receive its World Premiere at The London Film Festival. It is part of the International Animation Panorama Programme, which will be screened twice: on the 18th and the 23rd of October 2011

For more information click here

The Score Is Complete!

2011-09-04T17:15:00.000-07:00

A few days back, on the 31st August, we recorded the full orchestral score for The Last Belle. The music has been composed by the amazingly talented Stuart Hancock, who I am willing to bet will be a huge name in the film music world in the very near future.

We recorded with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra in the Slovak Radio Building, a strangely James Bond-like structure, shaped like a pyramid balanced upside down on its pointy end. A wonderfully surreal setting for a wonderfully surreal experience: that of hearing the actions and thoughts of your film characters translated into musical moments by another group of artists.

Caught up as I was with all the preparations for this moment, the flights out, the discussions, the logistics, I took Stuart's advice and had a quiet wander around the concert hall just prior to the recording, as the string section were beginning to assemble. And in those few quiet minutes I was hit suddenly with the size of the place, the amount of talent wandering into the hall and getting seated, and the beauty of the instruments dotted around. All these people coming together for a few hours to create this huge score for an idea that started life as a scribbled note in a sketch book...

The strings begin to assemble

The musical score is such an important part of the film making process (as it has been right from the days of so-called 'silent cinema'), but with animation it's doubly important. Even more so when there's a lot of non-verbal slapstick going on, which is certainly the case with The Last Belle. (Just imagine all those 'Tom and Jerry's without Scott Bradley's swinging, intricate music...)

Stuart Hancock, who composed the music for The Last Belle

Hearing the score come together has been one of the biggest kicks I've had during the making this project. I have no technical understanding of music and I can't play an instrument - at least not while anyone else is within earshot - so watching Stuart at work, and watching the orchestra perform is, to me, like some form of alchemy: the ability to move the air around our ears and transform it into emotions.

For more information on Stuart Hancock please click here
And for information on music production company Mcasso please click here

Why?

2011-08-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

Sam Spacey hand painting a cel

I've been asked a thousand times: why did I decide to use traditional techniques to produce The Last Belle? Why hand draw, hand trace and hand paint artwork and then shoot it on to film using a clunking great rostrum camera when the rest of the world has moved into the digital realm?

Well... there are two answers really:

Firstly, a bunch of us got together to make this film almost as light relief to the commercial work we do. The chance to move away from the monitors and get our hands dirty - literally - with graphite smudges, splattered paint and textured paper, was a sensual pleasure. The same kind of pleasure you watch when kids are engrossed in cutting and sticking stuff together. It's amazingly satisfying in a very real, non-virtual, way.

But secondly, and more importantly, I wanted a chance (and probably my last chance, as old equipment like rostrum cameras vanish into the skip) to go through the old processes, and learn about some of the 'classic' techniques from veteran animation artists.

I came into the animation industry on 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' and at 20 years old I was one of the youngest there. I was lucky enough to learn from the Disney veteran Stan Green (who had been assistant to the legendary Milt Kahl on many classic Disney films) and I became assistant animator to Richard Williams who was (and remains) amazingly generous with his vast knowledge of animation lore and technique. I was in the middle of all this, the archetypal kid-sponge, sucking up all the information I could. And then one day I went to bed and woke up 40 years old. Or so it seems. Then I was surrounded by a new wave of 20 year olds who - unlike me at that age - were already masters of their craft: the digital age of animation. So I had (and have) a lot more learning to do.

'The Last Belle' is the project I've used to bridge the gap between old and new. A chance not just to read about the 'old ways', but to try them all out for real, guided by veterans of the craft.The interesting next step is to combine the old with the new and see where it takes us...

In The Can

2011-08-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

I've just been deleting a bunch of old text messages. But here's one for posterity - a message from John Leatherbarrow, Director of Photography on The Last Belle, dated 26th October 2010, at 7:59 in the evening:

All reshoots done and at lab. Chin chin. JL

14 years after writing the script, the last frame was commited to film. To my knowledge this is the last time anyone will be shooting an animated short this way: 35,000 hand drawn, hand painted cels, shot onto 35mm movie film on a rostrum camera. (If I'm wrong about this I'd be happy to hear.)

John Leatherbarrow and Neil Boyle