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.
  

Silliness Unearthed

To make ammends for my last posting's verbal avalanche, here are a few simple sketches for you. I'm really digging back into the storage boxes now, finding earlier and earlier ideas that never made it into the final film.

In the first drafts of the script I elaborated on just how drunk Wally was getting prior to meeting his date, creating a quick montage sequence of his daily life, always with a can of beer in his hand...

Watching TV:

Cooking in the kitchen:

And.... er....

My own attempt at a perpetual motion machine.

It's silly. It's juvenile. It got cut out of the script.

But it still makes me smirk.

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!

Character Design - part two

Unlike the two characters we met last week, Rosie had a somewhat tortuous birth. Possibly the reason for this is that she barely existed in my first drafts of the script: early on I had concentrated on Wally's slapstick attempts to make it to a bar to meet his date, but the date herself was very secondary to the story. She could have been anyone - I was focusing on the journey, rather than the destination. With this in mind, Rosie started out more or less as the female equivalent to Wally: a big-nosed, crude creature, with ping-pong balls for eyes.

Well, they say Like is attracted to Like...

What a delightful couple they might have made...

I even began to do a bit a storyboarding using this prototype Rosie:

But as the story began to develop I became more and more interested in her character, and what she was thinking and feeling as she sat waiting in the bar for her date to turn up. I began to redraft the script and brought in my friend Jim Maguire to help me with the writing process. Slowly, Rosie became less and less similar to Wally, and more and more his complete opposite: whereas Wally is always moving, Rosie is mostly still; Wally is always silent, Rosie is always talking; Wally doesn't think at all, Rosie thinks too much; and so on. The more sophisticated Rosie became, the more I needed a design that would allow me to display her thoughts and feelings, yet still sit within the same world, graphically. This crude design wasn't going to allow me that. So it was back to the drawing board.

I gave her some flesh colour and separated the head from the body a bit and lowered the eyes, but found this drawing horribly simplistic, ugly and unappealing...

Another in a series of endless doodles... I have dozens like this one, all different girls.

Here's a hesitant blue sketch scribbled on the corner of a piece of paper. She's got a large mouth, able to cope with the dialogue, and similar eyes to Wally. She's beginning to feel part of his 'world' graphically, but different enough as a personality. I started to feel I was getting somewhere... but she still wasn't quite right. I was starting to get very frustrated by this point.

Then, one day: I remember absent-mindedly scribbling this (above) while I was talking to a friend. I wasn't even consciously thinking about Rosie's design, and I was barely even aware my hand was doodling, but when I  noticed the sketch a few hours later I realised that I'd moved her eyeballs right to the top of her head, just like Wally's, and given her the overhanging upper lip that allows her to look permanently worried (which she is for most of the story). I can credit this doodle to my drawing hand, or some deep recess of my unconscious brain, but not to any conscious thought process. Sometimes these things just float into you, like happy dreams in the night. This was the point where I felt we had 'discovered' Rosie. Simple though this sketch is, she felt familiar to me... someone I'd be happy to spend time sketching; a rhythm of lines and curves that were a pleasure to draw.

Sometimes it takes an awful amount of effort to end up with something as simple as this.

From this point on it was a matter of playing with proportions and seeing if this face could express all the emotions I needed it to. By the time Sienna Guillory came in to record Rosie's voice I had this colour sketch to show her - still not quite right, and still a bit frumpy, but something I hoped would help Sienna visualise the character.

Once the recording session was done I used Sienna's performance to help refine Rosie's design. Not in terms of looks (I'm not a fan of trying to caricature an actor's face) but in terms of the rhythm of speech, the melody, the general feel: all this affects how the mouth works, how far it needs to open, how mobile the eyes need to be, and so on.

And it's also during this process you can try out the different costumes or hairstyles that might be required for the story:

Rosie getting ready - hair washed and towel
turban in place.

By the time the animatic drawings were complete, often in colour like the one above, I was one hundred percent comfortable with Rosie, both as a character and as a graphic design. This meant that the animation phase was a total pleasure, free from any stress. I guess this is the animation equivalent to film or theatre rehearsals: building a character, the walk, the clothes, the speech patterns, the internal thoughts, so that the end result in front of an audience appears as 'alive' and fully rounded as possible.

Final production cel of Rosie with her hair tied back.

So, in much the same way Wally struggles to find Rosie for his date, I struggled to find her at all. But find her we did.

I wonder what she's up to right now?

Oh goodness... I feel a possible sequel coming on...

Character Design - part one

Of all the phases in developing a film, character design gives me the greatest heebie-jeebies. Not that it isn't a fun process, but creating a character you are happy to live with for the months/years it will take to bring to life, that sits in with the overall look of the film, and that will be able to perform all the things that is required of it (Is the face mobile enough to express emotions clearly? Are the arms long enough to reach for the props? Does the structure of the head work face-on and in profile and in three-quarter view?) can be a daunting task. It's the exact same process as casting a live-action film with real actors: so many directors have been quoted as saying that eighty percent of their work is done already if they get the casting right. (Vivien Leigh was born to play Scarlett O'Hara in 'Gone With the Wind' - no other actress could have touched her interpretation; but Alec Guinness - brilliant, brilliant actor that he was - should never have been talked into slapping on brown make-up and playing the Indian character Godbole in 'A Passage to India'. A horrible distraction in an otherwise amazing movie.)

The look of our central character, Rosie, was a struggle to find (more on this in the next post). But sometimes things can fall into place with incredible ease. Take, for example, the character of The Barman who serves Rosie as she sits in a bar waiting for her date to arrive. This was the first sketch of The Barman I made, and it's not a million miles away from the final design:

There's a reason this first sketch came easily. One of my oldest friends is David Bowers, director of live-action movies such as the recent sequels in the 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' series. We met up at college, and David became a very good animator and story artist, and in the process managed to sneak caricatures of me into a couple of the productions he had worked on. I was never able to return the compliment until I put The Last Belle into production and decided to model the Barman - very loosely - on David. (I say 'loosely' because caricature is not my strong point, and my often odd-looking drawings are hardly complimentary. But sometimes it's good to start with a real face as a jumping-off point, and then let your pencil take you where it will.)

I'll usually take a drawing like this and begin to sketch out poses and expressions that I know will be required to tell the film's story. In this case I changed the nose and played with the general proportions:

 And the more confident I felt, the more I'd work into full colour (pantone pen on paper) animatic poses, which then became the basis for the key animation drawings:

 Our drunken lout, Wally, was the first character to be designed, and the character from which the whole concept of the film developed. He first appeared in the corner of a sketchbook looking like this:

Knowing that he was drunk throughout the film, I wanted to keep his outline scratchy and irregular, as if it's falling apart. (Ronald Searle's line quaity was a huge influence here.)

Now he's getting a bit fatter, and I've moved the eyeballs right up to the top of his head. These quick ink sketches were made playfully and unselfconsciously, not to try and create 'good' drawings (were it not for this blog these drawings would never have seen the public light of day), but to see how expressions and proportions might affect the face.

So now I've moved the eyes to the top of the head can I get a frown, or a bored look? Quick doodles answer the questions...

Getting looser and faster now...

And as the body gets fatter the head gets smaller (well he's not the smartest of guys)...

And now the dreaded bermuda shirt has appeared. It seemed a funny idea at the time but hand animating it probably added about five years to the production schedule. You live and learn. The eyes are a little bigger and the nose a little smaller, but this has the unfortunate effect of making him 'cuter'. Sort of.

So to counteract this the eyes get even smaller and the nose even bigger. And by this stage I'm comfortable enough to start doing quick storyboard sketches, and feel 'in character'.

We have our man!

So these two guys were fun to develop. But Rosie proved harder to pin down. That collection of frustrated and irritated sketches I will save for the next post...