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.





Online Release!

At Last..! To celebrate our 100th blog post...

After dozens of festivals spanning two years and many countries, The Last Belle finally comes to YouTube!

Creating this film out of nothing has been something of an adventure: made with no money, countless years of work, no money, old-school technology, still no money, a great deal of love, and the loyalty of many hard-working craftspeople.

Click HERE to watch the whole film. Or via our Web Site  where you will find more info. And if you enjoy it please 'like' us, comment, or pass the link on to your friends.

Many thanks. Enjoy!

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... 

Christmas Gift

Christmas has come early this year! Or late, depending on how you look at it.



For various convoluted reasons we never got a chance either to pick up or receive The Last Belle's Grand Prize for Best Animation from the Rhode Island International Film Festival last year.

But thanks to Jeff Buttel and his team at R.I.I.F.F. the award has just made its transatlantic trip over here to London, where it now has pride of place on our shelves.

We're still just as delighted and honoured to have won the top gong. Thanks R.I.I.F.F!

Junk

My good pal and colleague Kirk Hendry has just released his fantastic short film 'Junk' onto YouTube, having completed a very successful - and multi-award winning - run on the festival circuit.

To watch the full 6 minute film you can click on this link.

And to read about the making of the film you can click here.

It's a quirky story, a visual delight, and it has a beautiful score by Janine Forrester. Watch and enjoy! And if you have fun watching, pass the link on to a friend!



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! 

Score Nomination!

Exciting news to hear that the amazing score to The Last Belle, composed by the equally amazing Stuart Hancock, has been nominated at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards !



The awards ceremony will take place at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, California, on November 21st. Best of luck to Stuart, and all the wonderful musicians who created the score. I've said it before on this blog, but I'll say it again: watching, and hearing, the music coming to life on the recording stage was one of the absolute highlights in the whole process of bringing this film to life. To create emotions, seemingly out of thin air, is true magic to me. 

For those of you new to this blog, HERE is some behind-the-scenes footage of the score being recorded.

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.

80 Animated Years

I've been asked by the good folk at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013 to pass on the news that on June 29th they will be hosting an event to celebrate master animator/director Richard Williams's 80th birthday this year. Sounds like an afternoon not to be missed!

To read more about 'Richard Williams: 80 Animated Years' please click  THIS LINK.

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.

25 Years! OMG!

This week I ought to have been hunting through more Last Belle artwork boxes. But instead I've been hunting through my kitchen cupboard.

Why?

To share this with you:

It's my Who Framed Roger Rabbit mug, dating from the year the movie was released, 1988. Both the mug and the movie are celebrating their 25th anniversary!

Half the colours on this mug have been worn away by time. Even Jessica's hair has gone white with age. But amazingly the mug is still whole and uncracked, after more than 9000 fillings of tea and coffee.

The film itself is - I'm sure - slightly less faded than my mug, having had a nice new digital overhaul onto Blu Ray to celebrate it's birthday.

I've mentioned before on this blog how working on Roger Rabbit was a huge turning point in my life. It was the first movie I ever worked on professionally, the project that introduced me to my mentor Richard Williams, the film that allowed me the chance to absorb how an A-list director like Robert Zemeckis works, and the event that cemented friendships that I treasure to this day. Working on Roger Rabbit was an experience that happened such a long, long time ago - something as ancient as my faded mug - whilst at the same time feeling as immediate as if it happened yesterday - as shiny and vibrant as the re-mastered Blu-Ray.

Time is a strange substance...

Animator's App.

One of the most professionally rewarding - and happiest - two years I ever spent was working with legendary director/animator Richard Williams, and producer Mo Sutton, on 'The Animator's Survival Kit - Animated' DVD series, originally released in 2008.

Richard Williams and Neil Boyle, behind a small selection of the animated
scenes produced for 'The Animator's Survival Kit - Animated'.

When I started work on this project I had already worked with Dick Williams on commercials, and two feature films: Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Thief and the Cobbler; but more than any work I'd done before, these DVDs changed my approach to animation, and made me feel for the first time that I had a much stronger technical control over what I wanted to achieve in a scene. Animating actually became fun - a pleasurable challenge - rather than an endless, gut-twisting, sweat.

Building upon Dick's original book, we animated over 400 examples of the animator's craft, incuding timing and spacing, walks, runs, flexibility, overlapping action, weight, dialogue, and directing. Dick Williams and Mo Sutton have now taken 100 of these animated teaching examples and converted them for use as an App for the iPad. Also included in the App is a complete copy of the Expanded Edition of the Animator's Survival Kit book, and Dick's previously unreleased 9 minute animated film 'Circus Drawings'.

Sounds like a great package to me!

For more information on the App click HERE.

And here's a review on Animation Scoop.


 

Southampton Screening

A fun day today: I was invited to screen The Last Belle to an enthusiastic audience at Southampton Solent University, and afterwards did a Q&A with the students who are currently studying animation there.

It's always incredibly energising to meet students, some of whom will eventually be the 'new blood' of the industry. And it's equally inspiring for me to see how many young students still have a passion for drawn animation, and want to see it as a viable career path alongside the digital/3D technology. The magic of watching drawings that think, walk and talk, never seems to fade, generation after generation.

Thanks to Charles MacRae and the other faculty members who made me feel so welcome, and to the students for asking a bunch of very smart questions.
  

What We Can Learn From Pins

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was - among other things - a pioneer of political economy and the author of 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations'.

So what? you might ask. What's Adam Smith doing here, poking his intricately engraved face into this animation blog?

OK - bear with me, if you will.

Today is my birthday. So far as I'm concerned birthdays are days meant for a little self indulgence, without the guilt. On my last birthday I hijacked this very blog to share with you some of my favourite artists and film-makers. This time I want to share with you my thoughts on.... well, like I say, bear with me if you will.

One of the most famous passages in Adam Smith's book 'The Wealth of Nations' concerns an analysis of how a simple metal pin is manufactured. He figured that to make a pin requires eighteen separate processes, such as drawing out the wire, straightening it, cutting it, pointing it, grinding it to receive the head, and so on... right through to inserting the finished pin into paper, ready for sale. And he worked out that if one person sat and performed all these tasks, operating single-handedly all the necessary machinery, he could barely make more than one finished pin in a day.

But Smith noticed that if ten people were employed and were trained to specialize in just one or two of the eighteen processes that went into the making of a pin, they could collectively make forty-eight thousand pins a day, or the equivalent of four thousand eight hundred pins a day each.

The Industrial Revolution was about to be born...

Fast forward to the the early part of the twentieth century and an animator called Dick Huemer was struggling to meet his deadlines when he realised that rather than sitting down alone to produce the hundreds of drawings required for his scene he could  draw just the main poses and leave the in-between drawings to an assistant - a division of labour that radically increased the amount of animation he could produce each day. The concept of Key Drawings, Inbetweens, and the charts that showed the assistant where to place them, had been invented!

Dick Huemer

By the 1930s animation had moved from being an almost solitary pursuit to a fully industrialised process: writers, producers, directors, concept artists, layout artists, supervising animators, animators, clean-up artists, inbetweeners, and on and on, with each department becoming increasingly specialised. And now, with the development of digital animation, this process of specialisation has increased almost exponentially. Look at the lengthy credits at the end of any major CG film and you'll see a vast army of character builders, riggers, texturers, cloth simulators, hair simulators, pre-lighting technicians, and people with credits I can't even understand. A digital '3D' film now costs, on average, two and a half times more to make than the traditional hand-drawn equivalent did (even adjusting for inflation) and employs two or three times the size of crew, each person with a unique area of expertise.

There is a lot to be said for this process of industrialisation: it drives technology, creates more tools for us to use, creates jobs, and promotes a greater quantity of high quality (at least in terms of craft) films for an increasingly large audience. But there are downsides too: the more expensive movies become to make, the more likely the content will be compromised artistically; and behind the scenes, crew members can begin to feel like ever-shrinking cogs in an ever-expanding machine - each making smaller and smaller marks on a bigger and bigger canvas.

For me, this is where the fun of making a short film comes in: it'll probably take you years to complete your personal labour of love, and you'll probably lose a ton of money doing it, but it is a wonderful chance to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with all the processes that go into the making of a film. During the making of The Last Belle I had a small and wonderful crew of people bringing their talents and crafts to the project. But I also had the chance to dip my hand in everywhere and try a bit of everything. The result: I found that there is something immensely satisfying in being both the director of a project (sitting in my ivory tower, so to speak) whilst also being the guy covered in sweat and paper cuts who has to haul into storage 75 heavy boxes of artwork up a vertical ladder.

Tim Burton, commenting on his early attempts at animation, once said: What I feel really good about, really happy about, is that I did not go to film school. I went to CalArts and went through animation, where I got a very solid education. You learn design, you draw your own characters, your own backgrounds, your own scenes. You cut it, you shoot it. You learn the storyboarding process. It's everything, without the bullshit of film school...

I learnt a lot from making The Last Belle, and had tremendous fun into the bargain. So if you're reading this and you have a hankering to make your own short film - a hankering you haven't quite got around to satisfying yet - I can say this: Get To It! Go on..! Roll up your sleeves and plunge in. It'll probably take you forever, it'll probably eat up all your savings, and on several occasions you'll probably wonder why you ever began... But you surely won't regret it.

You'll bring into the world one single, and one very unique, shiny little pin all of your own.

Good luck. Get to it!

Circus

Over the past few weeks - as you may have noticed - I've not had much chance to rummage through the Last Belle artwork boxes. This is because I've been up against a rather nasty deadline on a commercial project.

Is it me, or are production schedules getting shorter every job? Having achieved the next-to-impossible on one project you are required to achieve the almost-totally-impossible on the next.

In these situations it's great to have a core group of people around you - a little film family, if you will - on whose talents you can rely, totally. Producers, animators, assistants, compositors; a bunch of disparate characters who consistently help you get out of trouble when you need it most. Not unlike The A-Team (does that make me George Peppard?)

As usual, my big fat head is trying to soak up the limelight.
Let's remove it...

That's better! My clean-up crew on the latest job, ready to deliver the impossible:
(left to right) Aude Carpentier, Justine Waldie, Katerina Kremasioti,
Angeline de Silva and Alan Henry.

As we jump from job to job I am reminded of a circus rolling in to town: a little band of artists and technicians coming together to put on a show, before dismantling and disbanding, vanishing over the horizon in search of the next gig.

Who knows what, where or when the next gig will be, but in the meantime - job delivered - I'll be diving back into those Last Belle artwork boxes shortly.

More to come...

Nomination!

A very belated Thank You to Big Screen Animation for nominating The Last Belle as one of the best shorts of 2012, in the illustrious company of this year's Oscar winner Paperman.

We're feeling very honoured indeed to have been on your list. Thanks guys!

Bob

I'm sad to have heard that Bob Godfrey - the man commonly referred to as The Godfather of British Animation - has died, aged 91.

Years back I worked in an animation studio that could be reached only by climbing up a huge and winding staircase. On this particular day Bob was coming to visit us on a social call.

Now, I'd never met Bob before but I had grown up watching his animated TV shows and some of these shows were made with such tiny budgets that Bob would have to do all the voices on the soundtrack himself. So although I'd never met Bob I was very, very familiar with his distinctive voice. And it was this voice I could hear echoing faintly from the depths of the mighty staircase: Fifty-two... Fifty-three... Fifty-four... Fifty-five... Gradually the voice became a little louder: Eighty-six... Eighty-seven... Eighty-eight...

I got up and approached the doorway at the top of the stairs, the voice now puffing and panting a bit, but almost upon me: One hundred and twenty-three...... One hundred and twenty-four......... One hundred and twenty-five............. And into view came a man in shorts, wearing a hat from which sprouted an enormously long single feather. He grabbed my hand, shook it, and informed me with child-like wonder (as if I might never have noticed): You've got one hundred and twenty-six f**king steps!

That was my introduction to Bob Godfrey.

Half an hour later we descended the same steps and walked down the street to the local pub, The Coach and Horses, (the regular watering hole of actor Richard Harris, another famous face no longer with us). Bob spent the afternoon spinning the most entertaining and hilarious tales I had ever heard: his adventures with The Beatles, what Orson Welles had said to him, what happened on the set of 1967's 'Casino Royale'. But he also talked with affection about the vast number of artists and eccentrics who had worked behind the scenes at his studio over the years. There seemed no end to the anecdotes.

I still own my childhood copy of his book The Do It Yourself Film Animation Book, based upon his 1974 TV series. At the time this was one of the first books/shows explaining how animation was made, and Bob's infectious enthusiasm for simple and fast techniques that would appeal to kids must have inspired so many people now working professionally in the industry - myself included.

I'm so pleased to have had the chance to meet Bob.

Bob Godfrey  1921-2013

Here are some interesting clips from that old TV show:

Click HERE for Bob and Terry Gilliam explaining cut-out animation...

and click HERE for Bob and Richard Williams explaining peg-bar animation.

The Snowman app

I've still not had time to dive back into The Last Belle artwork mountain (more first thing in the New Year, honest)... so a last shameless plug for The Snowman and the Snowdog. Here's the app, developed by a nice bunch of people who came to visit us in the studio one day to see how the artwork for the film was put together.

I think they've done a rather nice job. It's getting some good reviews, and my children certainly like it. It's gentle and kiddie-friendly, and it's fun to fly around the London skyline...

And best of all, it's free!

If you're an Apple person you can get it HERE. And if you're an Android person you can get it HERE.
Enjoy!

More on The Snowman...

We had the crew screening for 'The Snowman and the Snowdog' today, which was a huge event hosted by Channel 4 in aid of the Make-A-Wish Foundation charity (their website HERE will bring a lump to your throat - what a great charity). There was a huge crowd, a handful of celebs, and even some fake snow blowing outside.

The crowd assemble in London's Empire Leicester Square theatre...

Full credit to Channel 4 for really getting behind this project and giving it a big push. Look, they've even put a giant flying Snowman outside their HQ building:

And a little explanation for those of you not based in the UK: there's a Christmas tradition of families running out to the shops before the Christmas holiday period to buy a magazine called the Radio Times, which lists all the TV programmes over a two week period right up to New Year. (It's such an old, established magazine that it retains it's title Radio Times from the days when there were nothing but radio programmes to list. Even when TV appeared on the scene and became firmly established they kept the old title.) When I was a little kid we only ever got the Radio Times at Christmas, and - in those days before VHS recorders, DVD players, or any kind of instant access to programmes and films - I would scrutinise it with great anticipation. Christmas would be the time to catch the TV premiere of a big James Bond movie, or one of the Disney classics.

The strange thing is, even though that's all a distant memory and we can access any filmed material we want, whenever we want, within a few months of it's cinema release (or even before it's cinema release, if any of you naughty, illegal types are reading this) the Radio Times is still something of a tradition, and to get on the cover is still hugely prestigious... So it's great to see this:

The Radio Times cover, drawn by Assistant Director,
and general Top Man, Robin Shaw.

One of the articles inside, featuring Aude Carpentier, a terrific assistant
animator and brewer of wake-you-up-with-a-jolt morning coffee, for
which many of us in the studio were grateful.

And a final blast of publicity: I got to shoot a short piece for Channel 4 showing how the character of Billy (the boy) is drawn, and then watching as the character comes to life on the drawing board. I believe they may be showing this a few times over the holidays, but the first screening is on Sunday 23rd December at 08:20 a.m. and in subsequent films animator Richard Fawdry will be doing the same for the characters of the Snowman (23rd December at 18:20p.m.) and the Snowdog (24th December at 08:20 a.m.)

Like I say, it's great to see a traditionally animated short film getting such a promotional push. Let's hope there will be more projects like this to come...