If Desks Could Tell Stories...

After weeks of 'spring cleaning' my studio space is finally clear...


Entirely barren in fact, apart from a few kilos of dust. I am moving out of this work space and on to pastures new. But the drawing desk is coming with me. This is the desk (same desk - different studio space) where I first sat down in October 1996 to produce the first of 35,000 drawings for The Last Belle. This is the desk at which 95% of my work on The Last Belle was laid out, drawn, redrawn, erased, thrown in the bin and rescued from the bin. I've sat at this desk squinting at drawings, yelling in frustration at drawings and laughing at drawings (is it slightly embarrassing to admit to laughing at your own drawings now and again?) This desk has seen me sit at it all day and sometimes all night, both clean cut and unshaven, both elated and despairing, and on one occasion almost entirely naked (long story).

In short, we've been through a lot together.

But for a short while - between moving from my old studio space to my most recent studio space - my beloved desk had to go into storage. For an agonising few months I had to go without the perfectly tilted drawing board, the ergonomically designed shelving, and the exquisitely placed shallow pencil drawers. Instead, for the duration, I had sit on a bench (far too low) at my girlfriend's kitchen table (far too high). My 'drawing board' was a jagged 'L' shaped offcut of perspex (far too thin, so it wobbled) propped up against two piles of magazines (far too unstable) with an anglepoise lamp (far too hot) shining up behind it. It was in this makeshift torture chamber I animated this scene:

  



And here's the funny thing: when The Last Belle was finally finished and cut together, this scene - born in complete agony and discomfort, and without the aid of my beloved drawing desk - leapt out as my absolute personal favourite.

There's probably some profound philosophical insight I should be able to gain from this... but I'm buggered if I can figure out what it is.





Labyrinth

Here are three sections of the background artwork for the 'falling drunkenly through the London Underground' sequence of The Last Belle, designed by layout maestro Roy Naisbitt:



The brief was to design these backgrounds so they reflect the drunken state of our central character - all woozy, billowing shapes and lines.

The three sections in this picture are physically joined together onto one long roll, but separated in this photo so they're easier to view here. In fact these three images make up only about a third of the full length of this particular background. At some point I must get around to having the full extent of the artwork photographed as some of these backgrounds are over 35ft long, and 30inches wide, to accomodate the dynamics of the camera wildly zooming and rotating across them. The artwork was never intended to be viewed like this; in the final sequence each part is revealed only in small chunks as the camera passes along. But nonetheless, seen out flat like this, they still have an incredibly mesmerising charm.

Bravo to Roy Naisbitt, a truly unique artist! I count myself extremely privileged to have his beautiful contributions in The Last Belle.

Animatics

For those of you visiting this blog and finding nothing new over the past couple of months: apologies! I've been having a very busy time putting a commercial animated project to bed. And more recently, I've been having an even busier time lounging around eating and drinking far too much over Christmas. You know how it is...

But before my festive gorging, I was at work on my latest project and found myself explaining to a visiting work-experience student about the animatic process. Most of you reading this will know what an animatic is, but for those who don't: an animatic is a filmed storyboard, often cut together with sound effects, and even possibly music, which gives a broad idea of how the sequence is (or isn't) working, prior to it going into the animation process. In the old days at Disney's they called it a Leica Reel (because it was shot on an old Leica film camera); some people in commercials refer to it as a Boardomatic; some feature productions call it a Story Reel. Whatever you call it, it's basically the same idea: lets see how the sequence is flowing before we animate it.

Sometimes these animatics can be drawn pretty crudely, and timed out in a very basic way, and they'll still give a reasonable idea of what is working, and what isn't. But in my years working at the Richard Williams studio I saw some pretty elaborately drawn animatics that really nailed down all the details of how a sequence was to be designed and played out.

An original animatic drawing from a Kellogs Frosties advert, drawn by
Richard Williams in colour Magic Markers.

( I can't find the final commercial online, but HERE'S a similar Williams Studio Frosties ad from the same period )

These animatics allowed the commercial's clients to see the things you would expect from this process - like the staging, composition, and editing - but the more elaborate the animatics became the more they gave indications of final character design, final colour design and character performance. This gave the (often very un-visual) clients and agency staff a chance to approve the work, or suggest their changes, before the elaborate and expensive animation work began. And the more drawings that were produced for each shot the more the director could control - and keep graphically consistent - the final animation that might go on to be produced by several different hands. The downside to this degree of animatic detail is that creatively it tends to tie the hands of each animator afterwards; but the upside is consistency and overall choreography in the final film.

Personally, I quite like working this way. I figured out all the dialogue sequences on The Last Belle by doing full colour animatic drawings beforehand. The drawings were timed out to fit the pre-recorded dialogue and gave me a good idea of where each sequence was heading.

An animatic drawing of Rosie. The pose and  expression was
inspired by Sienna Guillory's performance of the dialogue.

 Once the sequence seemed to be playing out well with maybe one drawing for every one or two seconds of screentime (sometimes more, sometimes less) then I'd trace the animatic drawings off onto animation paper with light blue col-erase pencil, number them with the approximate frame numbers (based on their timing in the animatic), and then begin to try and find the most interesting way to move between these 'fence post' positions.

I find this an amazingly stress-free way of working. You know your basic poses (the animatic poses) are already beginning to tell the story, so you're free to put on your animator's hat and just enjoy the process of building the believability and fluidity of the performance. You've already done so much thinking in the animatic process that the animation itself becomes fun. In a way, this process allows you to seperate your Director's brain (the macro - overview -  bit) from your Animator's brain (the micro - detail  - bit). So, in my opinion, if you're making your own short film and largely working alone, this is probably a pretty good way of keeping a handle on things and keeping your perspective. Not to mention your sanity.



An animatic drawing produced at the Richard Williams Studio for a Kia Ora advert.
The final commercial was animated at Oscar Grillo's studio Klacto.


(The final Kia Ora commercial can be seen HERE. )

It's interesting to see how this process has, over the past few years, spilled over to the live action side of the film industry, with 3D pre-visualisation of special effects and stunt sequences becoming the norm. In fact, the blurring and blending between animation and live action processes is now so extensive (both in the planning of the film and the final manipulation of  its imagery) that I begin to wonder if the separate categories we now have during the film awards season - Best Live Action Film, Best Animated Film - will eventually become impossible to define.

Uncharted waters. Strange and exciting times... 

A Potpourri of Last Belle

After our recent screenings in Brazil and Los Angeles I've had quite a few emails asking about the making of The Last Belle, and the production's history. A lot of the answers are here in this blog, but anyone could be forgiven for not finding them as they're scattered over 100 or so articles from the past 2 years. So, notwithstanding those of you who have been with this blog from the start (and Thank You if you have), here's my summary of some of the highlights from the past 24 months:

If you'd like to read more about Director of Photography John Leatherbarrow, and how The Last Belle was shot the old-school way: painted artwork photographed onto film, then click on Photography Part One, and Photography Part Two, and Photography Part Three. 

 

For the story of how layout artist Roy Naisbitt created his dazzling designs for The Last Belle underground sequence click here for Part One and here for Part Two. 

For more on the recording of the musical score by Stuart Hancock click on The Score Is Complete! and for more scoring pictures click on, er,  More Scoring Pictures.

 

The ancient - and almost dead - art of bespoke hand lettering. Thanks to Mr Mark Naisbitt it is still alive and kicking. For more on how Mark designed the lettering for The Last Belle click on Hand Lettering.

Hi-diddle-dee-dee, an actor I never will be. But thank goodness for those that do have the talent to step in front of the microphone. For more on this click on Performance.

Sam Spacey did all the hand tracing for the film; for more on her beautiful contributions click on Tracing

The London location became just as much a character in the film as the characters themselves. For more on how the locations were researched click On Location and More On Location...



And finally, a couple of my sporadic rants from the blog. This one sums up my whole relationship between film and digital, traditional crafts versus the cutting-edge, and how we applied all this to The Last Belle. Please click on Is Film Dead?  And this one is my message in a bottle to any reader thinking of making their first film - What We Can Learn From Pins.

For all the other goodies - deleted scenes, old sketches, how characters were designed, and so on - then I can only suggest pouring yourself a very large coffee, or setting off an exceptionally large render, and flicking backwards through these pages at your leisure...

I hope this potted guide helps our newest readers. And there will be more new stuff to come, shortly... Thanks for reading, and for writing in! 

Paperwork

The exposure sheets, which tell the cameraman/compositor where and when
each artwork element is placed throughout the shot.

It's been a few weeks since I've visited this blog, and that's for the usual reason: once again the impending delivery date on a commercial is hurtling towards me... Ground Rush!

...But on the subject of delivery dates, and keeping a job on track, I've recently turfed out a lot of paperwork from the Last Belle artwork boxes that's entirely to do with the production side of that project: 35,000 pieces of artwork spread out over a 15 year off-and-on production period, produces a certain amount of organisational paperwork. And in a strange way those charts and lists have their own visual beauty.

A lot of us Artsy types have an innate distrust of bureaucracy. I think I was born with it. Many studios descend into a them and us mentality when it comes to the 'Suits' and the 'Artists'. And from that mentality it's a short step to figuring that organisation = non-creativity and therefore creativity = anarchy. But I have to confess that in the first years of my career I soon came to realise all the artists I really admired were also amazingly organised people. Whether a director/producer in charge of a whole movie, or an animator in charge of a single element in a single shot, the most efficient, the most talented, the fastest, and frankly the most relaxed, artists tended to be the most organised from the outset.

Now, I'm no fan of paperwork. I once worked on a film for a major studio where I was confronted with endless, endless paperwork. One monday morning I nearly became a broken man when I received 96 separate forms to fill in with the Production Manager, outlining the projected work me and my studio was going to achieve by the end of the week. To fill out the forms with all the projections required -which would have meant dozens of meetings with all the department heads, and dozens of individual artists and technicians - would have taken several days. And this meant that by the end of the week I would have projected having achieved absolutely no work at all because I was too busy writing out forms about the work I should have been doing if I wasn't writing out forms. Kafka would have loved it.

Over the years I have stolen, or adapted, many organisational tricks from the better productions. But the tracking system I love the best is the 'Route Sheet'. It's been widely adopted and adapted now, but when I started out on the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (which, incidentally, was brilliantly organised) the Route Sheet system was introduced into Disney from Richard Williams's studio, where it had been developed by Williams and Roy Naisbitt. Like all great ideas it's as simple as hell.

A very simple, hand-drawn route sheet for The Last Belle.

Here's how it works: each shot in the production is represented by a horizontal column. On the left of this column is a picture of the shot (printed from the storyboard, or layout, or just sketched in by hand) and space to write in the shot number, the scene number, the length of the shot, and the animator. To the right of this the column is divided vertically into boxes representing whatever you need: animatic, layout, rough animation, clean-up, painting, rigging, compositing, whatever... These sheets are pinned up around the walls in their correct sequence order. At a weekly meeting all artists and production people gather around the route sheets and the director or producer begins to shade them in (traditionally in blue col-erase pencil!): Animation all done on shot 10? Shade the 'animation' column in blue. Animation only half done? Shade only half the column blue. The animation on shot 30 we thought was done, but has to go back into production for some reason? Erase the blue pencil so the column is white again.

One of the Roger Rabbit route sheet meetings (photo from Peter Western's collection)

It may sound archaic doing all this with pencil on paper, rather than on a computer, but here's the great thing about this system: it's available to everyone on the production, at all times, and in one glance. If you see a lot of white columns on your walls you know there's a lot of work to do, but if you see a lot of blue then you're steaming. As an artist, if you want to see where your shot comes relative to all the shots around it, it's up there on the wall, in its correct sequence order. If you're a production manager and you need to see where work is getting bottle-necked it's obvious with one glance. The beauty of this system is that it doesn't rely on number-crunching done in the privacy of a small back room somewhere. Instead it is a visual, instantly readable, democratic display available to everyone who walks past it, from the producer to the runner. It makes everyone feel part of a coherent whole, and everyone can watch the project grow.

I've never seen a better tracking system. And it works just as well for a thirty second commercial as it does for a ninety minute feature film.

There is little that gives me more pleasure at the end of a production than filling in those final blocks of blue, knowing that a project has finally been put to bed.

On the subject of which, time to pick up that blue pencil myself... I'll be back here in BlogLand shortly.

Last Belle Score!

Congratulations to the hugely talented Stuart Hancock on being long-listed at the Jerry Goldsmith Awards for his amazing musical score to The Last Belle!

Stuart Hancock at the recording of The Last Belle score.

And as if that wasn't enough, Stuart has also been long-listed for four other music awards: Best Music in Full Length Format, Best Music in Documentary, Best Music in Advertisement, and Best Music in Promotional Film.

To check out the full lists click HERE

And for more recent followers of this blog who may have missed my original posting from way-back-when, click HERE for footage of us all recording The Last Belle score with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra.

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?

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.

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...