TAAFI Screening

The Last Belle will be screening at the Toronto Animation Arts Festival International (click here for their website), which is taking place between July 6th - 8th. Their website will post more details of programmes and times shortly...

Last Belle in Brooklyn

The Last Belle is to receive its U.S premiere at The Brooklyn Film Festival (June 1st - 10th). For more details click HERE

Soundtrack Recording

Stuart Hancock, composer of The Last Belle score.

Here's a new piece of behind-the-scenes footage from the scoring session of The Last Belle (click here).

As I wrote a zillion posts back, working with Stuart and the orchestra was an absolute highlight of the whole production process. I can't wait to do it again on another project. Pure magic.

Cake and Jelly

Oscar Grillo, Geoff Dunbar, Mark Moore (headteacher at Clifton
College), Nick Park, Peter Lord, Richard Williams and me.

I went to a wonderfully sociable dinner in Bristol a couple of weeks back with various figures from the animation industry (Oscar Grillo has put all his photos and his accompanying commentary on his Facebook page here). At one point Dick Williams and Oscar - both superb draughtsmen themselves - were discussing various artists, including Kathe Kollwitz, and I had to confess that I had never come across her work until Dick showed me some prints of hers only a year or two back.

Kathe Kollwitz: images of great suffering...

... and tenderness.

Surely one of life's great pleasures is that rare occasion when somebody introduces you to the work of an artist, writer, film maker or composer and their work hits you squarely between the eyes - that feeling of 'how could I possibly not have known about this person all these years?'

The reason I am mentioning this? Today is my birthday, which as far as I'm concerned means I get to be self indulgent, and fly off on a tangent that has nothing to do with my usual Last Belle posts.

Here are two painters and one writer/director who have brought me enormous inspiration over the years, but whose names often draw blank faces when I bring them up in conversation. If you don't know them then please let me introduce you to:

Giovanni Boldini (1842 - 1931)

Does this man want his paintings
to move, or what?

  

The sense of movement, of life, is amazing to me.
These are snapshot moments, captured on paper
and canvas.

And Boldini always has a wonderful,
deliberately off-kilter sense of composition
that creates a feeling of movement in the frame. 

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 - 1893)

If Ridley Scott had been born before the invention of cinema
then he would probably be making paintings like this...

I can't think of any other painter who captures light
quite so cinematically.

A fleeting moment of light captured on canvas.



Alexander Mackendrick (1912 - 1993)

One of the great film writer/directors (The Ladykillers, The Man in the White Suit, Sweet Smell of Success) but - possibly even more importantly - one of the great teachers of the craft of storytelling and directing. The collection of his teaching notes, published posthumously, as the book 'On Film-Making: an Introduction to the Craft of the Director' remains, in my opinion, the best book ever on the craft of storytelling and film directing. I've read dozens of 'how-to-direct-a-film' type books, and this is by far the best. I re-read it constantly, and get new things out of it each time.

Mackendrick directing Alec Guinness on the
set of 'The Man in the White Suit'. 

So there you have it... Happy Birthday to me... Three treats I wanted to share with you. If I'm ever feeling a bit jaded by the incessant deadlines of the commercial world, or a just a bit under-inspired, these are three of the people I turn to for a bit of vicarious mentoring.

Back to The Last Belle next time... after, perhaps, a little cake.

More... On Location

I've aquired a vast amount of photographic reference of the London landscape, collected over the fifteen years we were in and out of production on The Last Belle. It'll be interesting to see how the reference - and the film - dates as the years roll by. Already a few of the locations we referenced for background paintings have been demolished (to be replaced with the usual generic glass boxes).

This location in West London is still very much intact though...

..and inspired (with a little adaptation) this sequence.



On the other hand this location was copied more or less exactly...



... to become the flat where Rosie lives. (I never would have
thought about how the bricks under a window sill will be
darker from years of rainfall, without having referenced the
real thing first. Reference is so inspirational, whether for
creating vast landscapes or the tiniest textures.)

 I've always had huge affection for old Hollywood movies that are set in London, but which were actually shot on the backlot in California - stuff like the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series, and Disney's Mary Poppins. In the days before lightweight camera equipment, and before fast lenses and film stocks (without which you often needed huge banks of lights to supplement the natural light) there was no way of being 'on location' other than to fake it under controlled conditions. And of course most of the Hollywood tycoons loved having foreign-set films being made actually just outside their offices, where they could keep a watchful eye on them (and, more to the point, their budgets). What I like most about these fake backlot 'Londons' is how they almost entirely ignore actual geography and opt instead for a kind of archetypal landscape of how we might imagine the perfect London to be. You like Big Ben and you like Tower Bridge? Who cares if they're really a couple of miles apart - just paint them next to each other on the backdrop so they look pretty together. And maybe straighten out the river in between so we can fit St Pauls Cathedral into the nice composition too.  I don't know about anyone else, but this is pretty much how my dreams work anyway: lots of correct details but all in the wrong place.

This was the approach we applied to The Last Belle backgrounds: try and get every single detail and texture right, but feel free to move things around and resize if it suits the shot or the sequence. And the strange thing is, the more 'theatrical licence' we took the more it began to feel like the real thing.

I am now no longer sure whether I'm living in the real London, or the London that exists in the film, as both of them seem as true to me as each other. Weird.

Incidentally, before signing off,  if you too are a fan of painterly effects and cinema 'fakery' check out the wonderful Matte Shot blog, a site I regularly get lost in for several hours at a time. Enjoy.   

Press

Delivering one job and immediately starting on another, not to mention exorcizing a pernicious bugger of a computer virus, all means that I've been a bit lax recently in attending to my blog posts...

But in the meantime we've updated our main web site to include a 'Press' button where we've added some press quotes and a copy of the latest article on The Last Belle from Imagine magazine. Please take a look...

Link here and then click on the Press button

Or you can browse through other bits and bobs here at the Imagine website

On Location

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?