Back to the Digging - part 3

So...to recap:

The hunt was on for a new shirt design. First of all I needed a shot of a shirt shop (how's that for a tongue-twister?) I made this horribly crude sketch:

I was struggling to draw the shirt shop because - as anyone who has ever set eyes on me will agree - fashion is not my strong point. In fact I don't even have enough fashion sense to come up with a design that has a lack of fashion, which is what I needed in this case. So I turned to Last Belle producer Rebecca Neville, who luckily is not only a great producer but a dab hand with the pencil too. And here are just a selection of the designs she came up with:

And there are many, many more...

I finally decided on a more geometric pattern that I thought would be OK to hand-animate through the various perspectives required, and made this sketch:

In the meantime I was working on the Last Belle script. I wanted a ten page script (to make a roughly ten minute film) but had ended up with a seventeen and a half page script. So I tore out the middle pages of the script, sat down with my old pal Jim Maguire, and talked through how to restructure the film. After some re-writing we ended up with... a seventeen and a half page script. Again. And no matter how many pages we tore out, and how many ways we re-wrote the story, we always ended up with a seventeen and a half page script. It just wanted to be what it wanted to be...

But early on in this re-writing process I lost the whole 'getting a new shirt' sequence. Wally started with his flowery shirt, lost it, and remained semi-naked for the rest of the film. It made the story flow faster.

All the animatic and design work we had done on the New-Shirt sequence got trashed. Or so I thought until it turned up at the bottom of a storage box. (And if I hadn't stumbled across it for this blog I doubt I would have even remembered this sequence was once planned.)

I'm as surprised as anyone at the things that crop up on the pages of this blog.