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.

L.A. Screening

It's been a few weeks since I've been at the wheel of this blog. The usual excuses apply...

But there is just time to tell those of you in the L.A. area that The Last Belle will be screening at the Royal Theatre on Santa Monica Blvd on the 27th, 28th and 29th of this month.

Thanks to Martin Bullard and his hard working team at Deluxe Digital in London for sorting out a brand spanking new DCP for the occasion.

And once I get through my current deadlines I'll be back with more updates - and hopefully a bit more digging into those old artwork boxes - on The Last Belle. Meet you back here shortly...


Illustration

I am still hurtling toward the delivery date on my current job, so no time for Last Belle artwork excavations... but there is time for a little plug for 'Croc on the Rock', illustrated by my friend, and one-time animation assistant, Tanya Fenton.

Tanya's done another lovely job (after her previous book, which she also wrote, called 'Three Silly Chickens') developing a cast of colourful, individual animal characters.

I have tremendous admiration for all illustrators, doubly so because I find illustration so difficult myself. I recently came across my old portfolio of artwork from my Foundation Course (here in the UK most art students do a one or two year 'Foundation Course' which covers all aspects of drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and so on. The idea is you get a taster of everything before specialising in your chosen field). Leafing through all my old work I was intrigued to see that almost all my paintings and drawings were some kind of metamorphosis, or multiple image, or the same landscape view painted in half a dozen different weather conditions. I was entirely oblivious to the fact at the time, but clearly I felt discontented by a single image, and naturally tended toward change and movement and progression. Or to put it more simply, I was a frustrated animator-to-be. I wanted the images to move.

So for an illustrator to tell a story, summing up the moment into one fixed image, requires great skill. An animator friend of mine once had to draw up the character artwork for the front of a packet of breakfast cereal. He struggled for a whole day, unable to come up with a single pleasing pose. Out of frustration he decided to do some rough animation of the character jumping dramatically onto the front of the cereal packet... and in the process of feeling his way through the flow of movement he ended up with a really nice drawing that became the final image. It's a handy technique if you ever have a mental block (and an animator's brain) and it has bailed me out on a few occasions. It sounds long-winded to animate a whole 'shot' just to arrive at one drawing, but anything beats the misery of staring at sheets of blank white paper, gripping a pencil that doesn't want to be your friend that day...

Rio!

A quick reminder that The Last Belle will be making its Brazilian debut at the mighty Anima Mundi festival, Rio de Janeiro, on August 7th. Would love to make it there myself one day... For more details of the festival and the films click HERE!

And while I'm in festival mode, thanks to the people of the Maremetraggio International Short Film Festival who gave The Last Belle such a great reception. Writer Martina Farci, of Media Critica, wrote a nice article comparing and contrasting our film with the live-action film 'Cafe Regular, Cairo'. One film in live action, one in animation; one serious, one humorous; but she concludes that both "see in a different way what is most universal in the world: love." And another nice review from Letizia Rogolino, of News Cinema, who calls The Last Belle "a fun and topical masterpiece of animation..."

Thanks to everyone who has been so supportive!