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?

The Bar

I was just clearing away some boxes from around my desk at home (the drawing board is needed this weekend, thanks to a looming commercial deadline) and I came across more rough sketches of the Ripov's Bar exterior. It's funny leafing through this stuff so long after the sequence was finished - although I remember doing the final backgrounds and animating the characters I can hardly remember all the rough sketches and design ideas that preceeded them. It's like flicking through a lost diary you don't ever remember having written...

Ripov's Bar was - like all the backgrounds in the film -
inspired by a real London location. I chose this place
to give us our basic building shape, with details added 
from a couple of other bars I'd spotted.

Back-of-the-envelope style scribbles, trying
to figure out two angles of Wally approaching
the exterior of the bar.

I would have doodled this while talking through
the shots with Mark Naisbitt.



Using my rough layouts, and the photo reference of real
locations, Mark begins to construct the final layout...

...piece by piece...

...even figuring out the neon lettering in perspective...

...until we have the final thing. I would then take Mark's
pristine layout,  paint it, and then 'mess up' the linework by
 drawing over it freehand with pencil or ink. This gave us the
 hand-drawn feel, but with a solid technical structure underneath 

Here's the final shot.

And the reverse angle.

I found a bunch of other doodles, sketches and photo reference in these boxes - I could easily lose an afternoon reminiscing through this stuff... but my commercial deadline is beckoning. More next time.

Welcome!

A belated welcome to Cartoon Brew, and more recently to the folk at Big Screen Animation, who have been kind enough to post articles on The Last Belle - and thanks too to the people who have taken the time to leave comments. It's hard to imagine how much more difficult it must have been only a handful of years ago  (before the internet, basically)  for people hawking their films around festivals and trying to get a gauge of audience feedback...

...And on the subject of how much things have changed in so very few years, after my recent posts on the rostrum camera I got to thinking about some of the stories our cinematographer John Leatherbarrow has told me from his decades of experience in the business. For example, it wasn't so very long ago that all animated maps and diagrams on television were still hand drawn, hand animated with their arrows and moving dotted lines, etc, and photographed on 16mm film. As John has explained to me, for a breaking news story the artwork would have been prepared somewhere like the BBC graphics department, biked over to his rostrum facility in Soho, where he shot like a maniac (no time for mistakes or re-takes, he had to get it right first time), after which John would often leap onto his own motorbike and tear around at illegal speeds to the laboratory which would then process like crazy to develop the 16mm print, which would then be biked back to the BBC and cut to length against a voice over, and finally (presumably after telecine transfer) be broadcast, all by the skin of their teeth. And this wouldn't be an occasional bit of stress, but a daily event. It was the only way to do it then. As I say, this was not so many years ago, but it seems like a whole different age now.

At the Disney studios the amount of time between the relatively crude black and white Mickey Mouse cartoon 'Steamboat Willie' and the lush, full colour complexity of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' was a mere 9 years - an incredible period of artistic change and technical development. It feels to me like our industry has, in the last several years, been going through - is still going through - another period of incredible change and development. This is a very exciting time to be sitting at our drawing boards, syntiques, or monitors. Even for people like me who want to bring a few of the more archaic techniques along for the ride.

Photography - part 3

As I mentioned in part one of these recent posts on Photography, I got the idea to colour-code each of the locations featured in The Last Belle from watching old silent movies - in fact, I remember the idea dropping into my head while watching Broken Blossoms (made in 1919 by D.W. Griffith) where the black and white photography had been tinted afterwards so that the interior of a fire-lit shack was tinted a warm orange/red colour, while the exterior night scenes were tinted with blue. As there is a lot of cross-cutting between locations in The Last Belle I figured that slightly tinting each location would help distinguish exactly where we are within a fraction of a second of the cut, meaning we could concentrate on what the characters were doing rather than continually having to establish where we are geographically.

Most of this work was done by John Leatherbarrow in-camera as he shot the film, either by gelling the lights and/or the lens itself. After all the footage was shot and edited we both sat down with Paul Dean, a terrific grading artist at Deluxe Soho, and made final tweaks and adjustments to the colours.

All the footage set in the Underground tunnels was tinted
green. I had noticed in all of Roy Naisbitt's reference photos of
the Underground that the fluorescent lights created a green'ish
cast on the film, so we replicated this - it also lent a slightly
nauseous feeling to the sequence which seemed appropriate as
Wally is fuelled by too much beer at this point in the story.

More green'ish tinting in the Underground. As with the previous
picture, John could isolate areas with mattes to control the lighting.
In this frame the area beyond the top of the escalator has been lit up to
help highlight Wally as he tumbles down the steps. In the previous
photo the headlights of the train have been burnt in separately.

The sequences set in the bar where Rosie sits waiting were tinted
with a pink cast. To help create an 'evening' feeling I was keen to
have a lot of neon lighting in the scenes. Mark Naisbitt created the
mattes for the neon, which John then backlit and burnt into the negative.

The bar clock features quite heavily in the story. John created
another lovely neon glow around the clock face for these shots.
Although it's perfectly possible to create diffuse lighting effects
like this digitally, for me there is nothing quite like shining real
light through a real lens onto real film emulsion...

For this shot of the 'London Eye' I asked John to create the
effect of the wheel being lit from below, as if the structure is so
big that the light at the bottom can't quite reach to the top. None
of these effects exist in the artwork itself, but were all created with
mattes and lighting.

More multipule exposure camera effects: the rain, rain splashes,
and subtle reflection of the cityscape in the glass were all built
up one exposure at a time, so that you 'feel' them there without the
effects distracting too much attention away from the character. 

One of the things I like most about working with John is that for all his technical knowledge what he's most interested in is the 'feel' you are after. After discussing a sequence for some time he would often just cut to the chase and ask me, "What exactly do you want to feel in this shot?" Once we had established that, then he was free to develop things at a technical level, and work his magic in the depths of the dark, dungeon-like camera room.

Photography - part 2

Here's another of our day-for-night shots, from rough sketch to final shot:

One of the important locations in The Last Belle is 'Ripov's' bar, where our main character Rosie sits and waits for her dream date to turn up. When we were developing the script I couldn't get a clear image in my mind of what the bar would look like from the outside, and how we could get it to stand out from the surrounding row of shops and restaurants of a typical London street. Then one day I was wandering through town when I spotted a pub situated between two intersecting streets, with its door placed in the corner. I grabbed a camera, took some reference photos, and this became the basis of Ripov's exterior.

Here's a rough sketch of the bar exterior. We were trying to find
a low angle that would allow Rosie's tottering high heels to pass
by close to the camera.



Producer Rebecca Neville also contributed some artwork early
on in the production. Here she's drawing up a rough layout,
 enlarged  from the previous sketch so that more detail can be added.  



The final layout, with its details, was reduced in size on a photocopier
to a standard 16 field so that the character animation did not have to be
drawn huge. I painted the final background in daytime colours,
except for the dark blue night sky.

With the background artwork complete, Mark Naisbitt created
a series of mattes with which cameraman John Leatherbarrow
could control the lighting of different areas. Here are the exterior lamps...



These are the bar windows. For continuity, these mattes would
be exposed onto the film using the same pink gel we used to
tint the interior bar scenes.

These are the upstairs windows...

...In the case of these windows, rather than colouring them with
camera gels I used yellow marker pen on paper, rendered with
a diffuse orange pencil graduation, all of which was placed behind
the matte and backlit.

And finally, the matte for the neon sign above the door. Yellow,
red and green gels were placed behind the matte to create the
different coloured neon.

When all this artwork was ready, and the character cels complete, John shot a series of tests. These would test the overall exposure of the background itself, the degree of blue cast we would use for the night-time effect, and the individual exposures for each of the mattes used to burn in the neon and other lights, as well as any other effects such as diffusion. When we had settled on the lighting effects and exposures, John would do the actual shoot, running the film through the camera for each element, and then rewinding and starting at frame one again to burn in the next element. In the case of this shot, he would also have to re-run all the character cels with each pass so that the character would block out the areas of the matte that it was passing in front of (if you don't do this the lights will shine through the character making her look transparent).

Here's the final composite image after all the lighting runs.
(For this shot the upstairs window matte has not been used.)

 Rosie steps past the camera...

...and adjusts herself, ready for her big date.

I tip my hat to John and his amazing patience in building up our shots in this way. (And, as if the job isn't hard enough already, most camera rooms are usually situated in the depths of a basement, sealed from all natural light, and sealed from the rest of the human race too: one mis-timed interruption could ruin a shot.) Glamorous, or sociable, it isn't. But the end results can be magic.