Raiders of the Lost Sequence

Time for more climbing up the mountain of old Last Belle artwork boxes...

...or more correctly: tunnelling. Like a caver, the deeper we plunge through the box tunnels, the further back in time we go. And in the deepest, darkest recesses I am now coming across early development work - and many, many ideas that never made it to the final film. Stuff I don't even remember drawing until I take the lid off the box and gaze inside. This, I guess, is one of the interesting side effects of working in a non-digital way: you leave a paper trail. Literally.

One of the earliest sequences I tested in animatic form was a 'Wally Get's Ready For His Date' sequence. I'd found a piece John Williams's musical score to the movie '1941' called 'Swing Swing Swing' that had great rhythm and a sense of rising excitment (here's an arrangement of it on YouTube, but unfortunately not the original wonderful recording). Using a thirty second chunk of this as a temp track I worked up a quick and rough animatic montage sequence showing Wally's ablutions, all timed to the music.

The big shave...

Which guy hasn't experienced this..?

Ear wax removal, to a musical beat...

Nasal hair removal, to a musical beat...

And a zit explosion to hit a musical climax...

Enthusiastic sponging 'downstairs'...

Slightly too enthusiastic a towelling downstairs too...

It was all drawn very fast and very crudely - as you can see - and with pretty crude humour too, but cut together in quick succession, with exciting and upbeat music, it worked a treat. Wally grabbed his clothes, burst out of the bathroom on a big musical climax and then... discovered he was ready for his date three hours early. I even animated, coloured and shot his burst out of the bathroom door as an early animation test.

I still have the sequence on video and would have posted it online quite happily, but for the fact that John Williams and Steven Spielberg would probably -and quite rightly- sue my ass off for misappropriating their original film music. And it doesn't really work quite so effectively when it's run silent...

Anyway, this was yet another sequence that got the chop before it went into production. And for the usual reasons: it was fun enough, but slowed up the story.

But - praise be to blogging - it's fun to revisit it here. It's always strange to come across ideas, drawings or sequences you've put down on paper years before, but have utterly forgotten in the meantime. It's a little like that feeling you get when you go in a multi-mirrored bathroom and catch sight of the weird looking figure in front of you, before realising you are looking at the back of your very own head...

Fresh perspective.

Maremetraggio

I'll be back to tunneling through those old artwork boxes shortly... but in the meantime more festival news...

We're delighted to announce that The Last Belle will be screening as part of the Maremetraggio International Short Film Festival, which takes place in Trieste between the 30th of June to the 6th of July. This will be our first Italian screening and it looks an amazing venue!

For more information on this festival in general click HERE

And for The Last Belle's details click on THIS

British Animation Film Festival

Time to return to home shores: The Last Belle will be screening at the British Animation Film Festival on Sunday 23rd of June. We're delighted to be part of a great variety of films on show at this relatively new, but exciting festival. The four programmes of films are being held at the Richmix Cinema and Arts Centre in London - really looking forward to it.

For more details please click HERE.

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.

Anima Mundi

Great news - The Last Belle will be in competition at the mighty Anima Mundi International Film Festival.

The festivities take place in Rio de Janeiro (2nd - 11th August) and Sao Paulo (14th - 18th August) with a touring version travelling through other Brazilian cities.

For more information click HERE.

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?