Closing In

I'm shooting close-ups just now.  They are my favourite bits because these are the shots that tell the audience what the character is thinking and feeling.  Arguably the most critical parts of a film.  There's also less for the audience to look at so accuracy in things like lip sync and eye movements are important to convey meaning.  Absolutely vital is the registration of the puppet's position on the screen so she doesn't jump around and become painful to watch.  On a small stage like this (Roughly 1/8th scale) a movement of less than a millimetre is simply HUGE in a close up.

I've said before that animation is like acting through puppets and that is never more true than in the close shot.  I find therefore that it helps to have the camera close to the puppet when I'm taking them.

Now what is Tom Hardy thinking?

The same is true of live action, by the way.  Every actor, no matter how engrossed in the pretense of the role; knows where his audience is and when he is performing for a close up, the size of his action (Oi, behave!) changes from when he is playing in a long or medium shot.

It's only human nature: his audience is up close in front of him so, psychologically, he doesn't feel like he has to project his acting to the back stalls but can express a complex thought with a tiny twitch of his eyelid.

Just so in animation, with the camera so close that it almost gets in the way of your working,  you are constantly aware that the performance of subtle movements in the eyes or of a swaying strand of hair needs only to travel a couple of inches to it's audience, so you instinctively make those micro-millimetre changes necessary from frame to frame.


Then there's the walk cycles. One still to go on that front, damn, but they're hard to do!  This recent slate with the character walking reverently from background to foreground used up all of the rigging tools that I had, switching between screw-downs from under the stage - only necessary while his feet are in view, then moving on to a clamp attached to the rigging point on the puppet's pelvis and when the boom arm from that could no longer be hidden by his robe, a vertical pole and spreader and finally my personal favourite, the "bobbing up and down on a stick" device as he comes into focus.

Something that didn't occur to me until this is that all that rigging, though invisible to the camera, casts shadows on the set.  Shadows that you don't notice until they mysteriously disappear as you change the rig type.  Just to the left of frame is a collection of black flags creating replacement shadows where the big black rigging boom used to be.  It's been a trial but it's come out a lovely shot.  It's too near the end of the film to show it to you in full here so, no.

Going Again

I am on a journey.  A noble and valiant quest, risking all that is precious to answer one of the greatest questions of our age.

WHAT IS A GEEK?

The Geek Test offers some criteria

If I had a pound for every time the answer to that has been "You are" I would have much more time to spend with my family.  But I have never really been given any explanation of what it truly means to be a geek.  I enjoy science fiction, own a computer and have a strong aversion to sports, but that goes for a lot of people.


Of course if Jon Ronson is right and the world is run by psycopaths the role of the Geek must be critical to their success.  The heads of Microsoft and Apple must have some appreciation of this.  (Am I the only person left who doesn't own an iPad by the way?)  Because the best - and kindest - definition has to be from DJ Blu Peter "Someone who pays attention to the minutia of life"

A details man in other words.

My current detail is the reconstruction of the great animation stage in the new house. I'd run out, anyway, of all those little jobs that need doing in a new home: patching up the dodgy wiring in the living room, descaling the waterworks, finding that sweetspot on the thermostat that's right between sahara and baltic and properly colonising the shed.  It's called the Gillespie Stage by the way, in the manner of the Richard Attenborough Stage or the 007 Stage at Pinewood.  It has been a lesson in getting on with it and finishing the damned project before I move in future.

Finally, it fits!

Actually one of the first and most precious boxes to be transported was the one containing the very carefully packed polystyrene and plaster rock face.  Precious because everything else in my life: the equipment, clothes, crap and books can all be replaced more or less like for like. This set, on the other hand, is a completely unique object, the destruction of which would render eight months of work on the project utterly worthless (that's including the footage already shot)

Chaos behind the scenes

So the rebuild has given me a very thorough appreciation for set designers who work in touring theatre. The various modules of the set were organised so that the cracks between them were disguised by natural crevices and overhangs.

Thought I was being clever, didn't I?  Unfortunately - and I cannot explain why - the surface of the stage floor appears not to be as completely flat as the one on which I built the set, despite being one and the same.  The gaps took some man-handling out of existence in spite of the small scale of the thing, there are some holes I can't seem to shift.  I shall just have to be cunning with the photography and, unlike the first take on the new stage; I shall have to pay very close attention.

Specifically, I shall have to not start shooting with a principle character's eyebrows mysteriously absent.

So much for details....

Wrangling Data

I took some time to make prints this week.  Working with a DSLR is a surprising return to the practices used on film stocks.  The camera takes very high resolution pictures that are not practical to work with on anything that isn't a government supercomputer.  The way I work is I capture video-assist from the camera's live output tap and then, once i'm happy with the shot and the sequence of movement, I unload the camera and develop the pictures.

I don't use any particularly fancy software.  I know SMP and DragonFrame are incredible tools and every day or two I wonder which one I should hitch up to but until I can pull the finger out I'm still using Monkeyjam which does the basic job rather well.

I shoot everything on twos i.e. each movement lasts for two frames - this works out as a peculiar 12.5 frames per second (FPS) in the European 'Pal' video standard of 25 FPS.

It sounds like a cop-out but the difference is barely noticable unless the animated movement is very quick.  Then I can switch to singles - one frame per move - for a half second or so and switch back.  You'll never see the change, and fewer frames means less hard work.  So that's what the computer does for me; keeps track of all my inconsistencies.

The camera meanwhile is recording each frame in 3675 lines... or some other indescribably big number, I can't remember.  This is RAW format which is the digital equivalent of a film negative.  Every percievable bit of light is recorded on the file so that if, on a whim,  I decide in post production to stage the scene at night, I can process the final video to look how I want.  (I'm not joking, I had to do this once and while it's basically impossible to do it with Standard Definition Video, shooting in RAW makes it rather easy)

Then comes the sequence assembly.  I go through the exposure sheets - generated by the computer at the shooting stage - this lists how long each picture holds on screen (usually either 1/25th or 2/25ths of a second - very occasionally 3/25ths, never more) and I line up the frame numbers with the dialogue soundtrack.  This takes ages.

 

The finished product is a strip of AVI video measuring 1080 by 1440 pixels which can be imported into any video editor (I use Avid because I'm an Avid fan - don't even get me started)  After that it's just like proper filmmaking. I'm nowhere near that stage on Firebird but now at least I have some video to play with.

Defying Gravity

That mammoth Sequence 004 with it's hundreds and hundreds of frames, moving camera, emotional dialogue etcetera is in the can.  I've processed the raw frames and backed up all the data.  The poor puppet has been stripped down to bare bones for major repair work - she was literally a wreck by the end of it.  I've had to rebuild her jaw and replace half her face!

Her last words in the slate are spoken facing away from the camera out of necessity - she simply could not have managed the lip movement. A peculiar consequence came about, however, because I needed her to end the take with an angry reaction to an offscreen event that was now a full 270 degree turn from where she was facing.  She performed the turn magnificently, of course, but watching it play back the first time, my immediate reaction was a burst of unexpected laughter at how ridiculously flamboyant it was!

We are all terribly serious!

I was mortified at my insensitivity.   This is not meant to be funny!  Playing through the shot again and again, I began to work out what happened.

Have you ever been in a situation (family arguments and funerals have a strong market share here) where the seriousness of a situation makes it so inappropriate to laugh that a giggle becomes the only rational response?

Have a think and we'll come back to it.

Meanwhile I've stumbled across a film that gave me a bit of a fright.  I spoke not long ago of bad tripods and what should crop up but a production by R S Cole operating as Wobbly Tripod.  Coincidence, you say?  Well just you have a look at his set.



I'd never seen the film until yesterday - I'm certain I would have remembered - and of course Cole's story is different, but I'm struck by how similar my mise-en-scene is to the grand matte paintings above.

I even wanted to start by pulling out from a waterfall!  When I saw the little bird flit past, my heart nearly stopped!  I think I'd better think that bit out again.

Gravity makes water fall

Eric Idle (yes, that one) wrote a book called The Road to Mars.  In it he poses the question:  What's the opposite of gravity? Gravity, we know; is a force that keeps everything down, stops things from simply floating off into space.  Newton's laws suggest that for every force in the universe there ought to be an opposite force right? In nature you have electromagnetism which makes the ground nice and hard so things don't fall through it into the centre of the earth.

Did you think of a time when you laughed at the wrong moment?

We also use the word gravity to describe something else.  Not a force but a state of mind.  Idle concludes that the opposite of gravity is levity  A state that lifts us.  It does what electromagnetism does in the physical.  Prevents us from collapsing under the weight of our circumstances and creating  black holes.  Another way of describing the onset of depression. A bit of humour makes us step out from our thoughts and can stop us from taking ourselves and the things that happen to us too hard. Getting to a laugh in time can be a lifesaver.

A cautionary tale:  The Weasels all died laughing

In our lives and in our stories, we must have a balance of both.  I guess that's why my puppet made me laugh before.  After a long time (too long - five weeks shooting that scene) being grave and melancholy, you've got to throw in a laugh to re-balance yourself for the next thing to happen.

But you don't want to take it too far - remember the Weasels from Who framed Roger Rabbit?

Nailing that shot

In live action film making the conventions are different.  At college I was always told "tape is cheap" "shoot everything you can"  "You'll only use about ten percent of it, but if you have the time, do another angle!"

Sony pictures showing off

Single camera film units repeat the action of the whole scene three or four times to get the coverage and then the shots are chosen in post production to assemble the scene the way it works best.  It's a bit tough on the talent but with the exception of Hugh Grant they all love it, really.  The only limit is the time it takes to go again and again.  I've seen bigger productions use several cameras to shoot the scene just once but from so many different angles it makes no difference.  DP Gabriel Beristain maintains he will work no other way.  But of course that's a luxury available only to the multi-millionaire project.

Animation (on whatever budget) is the opposite thing altogether. Because it can take weeks to shoot a single take, more pressure is on the planning of your shots so that they not only work out first time but can be cut together exactly the right way.  You simply cannot afford to get the coverage that live action film makers take for granted.  Your options at the edit bench will often amount to roughly a half second at the beginning and end of each shot to trim for perfect timing. 

If you have multiple stages you can have several identical puppets working on different scenes simultaneously, but of course you'll need multiple animators for that and that's costly too.

Biddly dee de deeee, Two cameras...

I tried once using two cameras on the stage to shoot a scene from two angles so that I could cut back and forth between them and only work the animation through once - Shoot One, Get One Free.

I was allowing indecision to get the better of common sense.

Not only was half of the material useless to me in editing (naturally - why would I want to see the whole action twice in the film) but it saved me no time whatsoever!  Both units were controlled by one computer so I lost time switching between capture windows and making sure that the action looked right from both cameras.  The computer ran more sluggish so I had to wait longer for it to capture frames and - here I blame my tools - when the infernal auto-exposure buggered about, I had two problems to solve instead of one.  Turns out it took almost exactly twice as long as single camera shots of the same length.

What's more, so much of my attention was spent elsewhere that the quality of the animation itself came in just short of mediocre.

...although I did have two identical versions of it!

Quiet on set

I haven't posted much in a while, have I?

Fact is: I haven't made enormous progress.  I'm still on the same shot I was working on last month - remember "Smooth camera motion: the stuff of legend?"  Yeah pathetic, I know; but I've had other stuff on and the nights just aren't as long as they were in January.

What I've found interesting is the effect that this scene is having on me.  It's a deeply troubling moment - a turning point in the narrative for both characters.  Technically it's complicated:  Six hundred and eighty eight frames (That's a 6 with TWO 8s after it!) Medium Long Shot developing to Mid Shot with a crane and track. Two characters: one with heavyweight dialogue and the other listening and being moved by what he hears - but subtly, without upstaging the other character who is the main focus of the shot - that's quite hard work for a human actor, believe me, let alone a rubber one who's neck appears to be coming loose.


I hope the audience takes all this in!!!

What's more, I only seem to manage a handful of frames in a single run because - and maybe it's just that I'm a big girl's blouse, but I've found that I'm coming away from it every time quite emotionally exhausted.

"Get - the - damned - microphone out of my face"

I worked with an actor a few years ago who got bit hot under the collar with the crew for continually stopping takes when the microphone boom dangled into the shot.

It was awkward but I can't be hard on him. An actor has - in many ways - one of the most difficult jobs once the camera turns over.

Not only has he to remember his lines and not bump into the furniture (thank you Noel Coward) he has to hit specific marks on the floor/walls/imaginary points in space,   follow a thought process that is out of sequence and is interrupted by long periods of rigging, refitting, lighting and lunch.  He has to respond to whatever else is going on - assuming the thing he's responding to is actually happening in the room and not being added later.  AND, even if it isn't really there, he still has to respond to it!

Simultaneously, he must not give away the fact that the intimate private moment  he's sharing with his secret lover is being intently ogled by dozens of people, many drinking coffee; and all the while, pretend that his legs aren't wrapped around a ton of grip equipment! He has to say and do the same things over and over again all day and each time make it look as if he just thought of them, and of course; he must do it with feeling.

Okay, so perhaps mining for Coltan in Venezuela is a harder job, but you get my point.

On this slate, I'm doing all of that stuff for two.  And it's just gone midnight, so I'd better get back down the mine and get back to work.

Walk-on Part

In the subterranean, after-hours world that is stop motion animation, I often hear agonised screams on  the wires as people desperately try to get unwilling puppets to enact convincing walk cycles.  It's hard.  Really hard.  Many of us take walking for granted and have done so for so long we don't know any better, but imagine yourself an infant again.  You've never put one foot in front of the other.  You don't know how to balance on two points, you don't even have an inner ear!  Then imagine you have no muscles and you begin to see the problem....

Sometimes, though, I think animators of all disciplines place too much emphasis on walking.  Seriously, how many other kinds of movies do you see people walking around a lot.  Because audiences predominantly take walking for granted, movie makers seldom think to incorporate legs into a shot let alone focus on the action of walking across a room.

This clip is from an earlier project.  Seventeen minutes of animation in which there's just under 40 seconds of walking.  I seem to have got away with it.

I have found it's far better to go to the riggers department (my old Meccano set; it lives under the sofa) and see a man about a device that bobs your puppet up and down on a stick, the way a normal puppeteer would do it. Then you can shoot the whole scene quite happily in medium and close up and never have to do any hard work.

I have a notion in future to do a jazz dance routine - but it won't be on this film.

Getting a Grip

The first time I made an animated film I was aghast to get the rushes back (It was on film, I had to wait weeks before I could see what I'd done, talk about PATIENCE!) and found that the tripod I had used was sadly deficient and the shots waved around in the air like they just didn't care.

They're STILL cool!

That was a hot lyric in those days, okay?

Well, having shot three hundred irrevocable feet of it, I just had to grin and bear it, after all, what could be done? I like to think, now, that it adds an edgy, sinister feel to the production, and takes the audience's eye off the (obviously) cardboard scenery.  Also, I was fifteen and about to discover boys, so you could say I was on a timescale!

It's the second thing you learn in movie making of any kind, isn't it? - after "The bigger glass bit points forward" - Lock your tripod off, if you must pan, pan slowly AND LEAVE THE ZOOM LENS ALONE!

Then you watch Shameless or that thing with Matt Damon and they do none of that and THEY seem to get away with it.   ...actually, that thing with Matt Damon doesn't get away with it; bad example.

Then you can't bear to look at a screen unless the camera is up to something frightfully clever.

You keep the Manfrotto catalogue under your mattress.  (It's an Italian grip-kit manufacturer. Get your mind out of the gutter!)

Ahhh.  Smooth Camera Movement: The stuff of legend

You ache, you pine for Disney's ACES (Automatic Camera Effects System) The computer for it can HAVE the spare room, dammit!

You begin experimenting with roller skates, shopping trolleys and guillotines, the office type not the french revolutionary tool; and your eye for static shot composition slowly withers in a box alongside Battleship and Pac Man and other childish things.

I have to confess, having striven these past twenty years to get my grubby paws on every tripod under the sun, from a 1929 wood and chrome "tank carrier" to a wafer thin gooseneck bendy thing which has yet to find it's place in the world, it occurred to me this afternoon that I seem to be on a crussade to avoid using a tripod for anything on Firebird.

This current shot involves a heath robinson affair composed of parts of a pre-historic B+Q drill-press that I picked up in a charity shop over a thousand years ago.

It's been sitting in a cupboard all this time waiting for me to work out what I can use it for.  It certainly won't hold any modern drill, but it does have this really good incremental pedestal motion.  It can be adjusted for tension and it has a nice long lever so that it can make those precise and microscopic changes in position I need to make my camera  - finally one that holds completely steady between one frame and the next - appear to do something frightfully clever.

Losing direction

I'm at that point in the project where I've lost sight of what I'm trying to do.  (Not something I'd ever say to a shareholder but you're not that so it's okay)  I've got involved so deeply in the cinematography, effect supervision, data wrangling and yes, acting; that I can't quite remember what the point of the story is!  This is why a director is a useful object to have on a unit.

Film making:  It's mostly just sitting about

20th century pioneers spoke of  directors as "those guys on the set who don't do anything." I think that's still a very valid observation.  The process of film making is so complicated and full of specialised tasks that it takes the objectivity of a bystander to judge what's actually right for the screen. BAFTA winner Richard Kwietniowski describes himself as the first member of the audience.

In the real world, I've seen directors get wound up in the excitement of actually making a film - it is terribly thrilling, despite the stereotype about the prevalence of sitting about waiting  - but I've also seen the results suffer from that.

So I worry about it.  It's happened to me before:  Working on another short, I completely gave up on anybody ever wanting to see the damned thing.  I didn't know what I wanted to say any more,  couldn't work out if the script was developed enough to make sense or if it was painfully wooden and over exposed.  However, the resulting product, though imperfect was very well received, so what do I know?

Margins are for scribbling in!

Out there is a director who knows exactly what he wants to see and precisely how to achieve it so the process of shooting his film can be reduced to a technical assembly of components. But I imagine that guy's too busy working on Final Destination 9 to offer me advice.

If I'm honest, I rather like the insecurity.  I'm confident that I've done the groundwork, tilled the metaphorical earth and sown the proverbial beans.  Now, as director, I'll have to sit back and wait for the crop to grow.  I can get on with the technical processes because they're important at this stage.

In stop motion, the puppets, the props and the costumes all seem to make decisions too and there's myriad other influences, so I'll never have exactly the shots I've so meticulously storyboarded. (I'm being deliberately ironic. Master of the storyboard M. Night Shyamalan has little to fear from me: see picture)

The final word on letting go is offered to renaissance artist
Michelangelo who always maintained that his sculptures had always existed.  That his job was simply to clear away the bits of stone that weren't needed.  I'm all about preparation - no, really, I am - I'm just not interested in making a film that I've already seen.

Saved by the Arc

It's raining again.

I recently heard Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park talking about his experience of directing live action for the first time. "I don't know how people do it," he said, "it must take a lot of patience."

You see; with video-assist technology and instant playback and that 'holl grail' combination of well fabbed puppets and good rigging, stop-motion in production is more instantly gratifying even than Google with it's 59,900 results in 0.15 seconds.

This brilliant video by Tom's Thumb animator Tom Grainger has been making me chuckle.  In it, he struggles with the petulant George.

Last night I stopped chuckling.  I was having an artistic disagreement with my leading man (puppet) about the way his character would move. It was my turn to flounce off the set to make a cup of tea and wish that I still smoked.

Image: RMIT Centre for Animation and Interactive Media

What's worse: he proved to be right - in animation there are no bad actors, only bad directors - it was his other foot that should have moved first.

Getting technical, most movement in nature happens in arcs.  No, not two by two; you're thinking of Noah. These arcs form the basis of all animation.  Once you realise this, once you come to absorb and assimilate that fundamental; then patience can be flung out the fourth floor window because most of the time, you're just following a prescribed arc of movement with the arm or head or eyeball or whatever part of the body you're working with until you reach the end of the arc and either come to rest or move into a new arc.

Sounds pretty simple, really.  Of course you're never just moving one thing through one arc but maybe up to twenty or thirty different parts could be contra-rotating simultaneously and the camera might be moving in it's own set of arcs and that's why I only shot ten frames yesterday guvnor!

The puppet knows he's right

However, because his feet are out of shot, only he and I (and now you) will ever know of our argument because I finally got my gnashing jaw around the bitter chestnut that is follow-through and, with seven and a half seconds already shot, we negotiated our way round to putting the wrong foot right, found the correct curves and bounces and saved the take.  I'd show you but I think I've said too much.  Also, the shot is STILL not finished.

We may love or hate the months of labour that it takes to fabricate a working puppet, but when they pull off a trick like that, you could just kiss their rubbery little faces! 

....would that be a bit weird?

Skin and Stone

So about the show! Firebird, in the last three months of pre-production, has been all about textures.

Texture is so important to me. It's why I prefer working in three dimensions. Even when I do concept drawings, I love starting with something like crayon or pastel to get into that tactile space straight away. (Also I don't draw very well so pastels let me smudge and pummel the picture into shape once it's on the paper.)

Wood and wire and old bits of sponge

Human skin is the most amazing thing.  It takes some effort to find a material that is as flexible, durable and both firm and elastic enough to do all the things we demand of it.  It takes colour very well and lights like a dream - it's no wonder we've been using it in the Being-Human industry for so long.  Of course, it's far too expensive, not to  mention ethically questionable to use it on puppets.  So I've tended to work in the past with clay and silicone both of which give you a good texture and flexibility. Particularly when it comes to lip sync.

But there is something about clay, maybe it's the translucence or the range of colours or perhaps just the fact that you can't put make up on it that always makes it look a bit like cartoon.  It would have been totally inappropriate to the mood of the production to have the characters looking like Shaun the Sheep.

I was curious to try latex faced puppets for this one because there's a kind of rugged tension in a rubber skin that makes a puppet look desperate and taut.  I followed an inspiration from Alberto Giacometti to build these craggy skeletal creatures that could only really have wire armatures.

I'd used latex in the past to make costumes:  It gives them a nice, controllable, bounce-back characteristic, and you can glue it rather than sew, but using it as a sculpting medium was new for me.  Build-up techniques poached from Nick Hilligoss got me underway and I learned things about rubber that will serve me for very long time indeed. Like: You only need a TINY amount of thickener!

The monastery is a mix of clay and plaster rendering

The monastery was always going to be in the mountains.  Movie Monasteries are, aren't they?  Of course it has to be remote.  I want that sense of alienation - like it's not even necessarily anywhere on earth.  When you're as devastated as my main character here, anywhere you go you're going to feel a bit distant and isolated.

However, I do want the monastery to be inherently organic - it starts out looking forbidding and lonesome but it needs to develop into something nurturing and strong.

As a child I went on a school camping trip on the slopes of the volcanic Mt Meru. There was a quality in the solidified lava flows that I can't describe but I returned a different person in very important and necessary ways.  In my mind, I guess this film is set on that mountain....

Jumping off cliffs

I've just jacked in the day job primarily because it wasn't allowing me enough time to do stuff that matters.  Yes I'm opening myself up to the inevitable verbal assault from everyone I can think of that "in these recessive times a job is a job and a bird in the hand..." etc.
 
Sometimes I think we could all take a healthier example from birds than some hackneyed hunting analogy.  Where would those birds be if they never took the risk of throwing themselves out of the nest in their first efforts at flight?  Probably they'd end up in more hands than they'd care to!

The thing is this:  The creative industries operate on a system that economists have no model for.  My cock eyed optimism settles it's gaze on Travis Knight - stop motion animator and my current fixation.

Travis Knight is very pretty

The Will Vinton Studio (Who?) took a punt on him in the 1990s.  A boy with no credible experience in the field looking for something to do with his time after the bombing of his first album (it's not relevant so out of reverence I'll hear no more about it here)

Following the turn of the century when advertising and production projects all over the world fell through the floor, Vinton was a few frames away from going to the wall and in a moment straight out of a Hollywood fairytale, Phil Knight, Travis' father; stepped forward with the money to save it.  The ensuing changes to the board - including promoting Travis to it - ignited the rockets under Laika.

Laika, for those of you at the back, is the other stop motion production company.  One of the first to shoot in stereoscopic 3d, they did so a very long time before Aardman ever took that gamble and they have not gone unnoticed. They've traded on the reputation of 2009s outsider bet: Coraline, and poached most of the people  responsible for Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride and are looking likely to swamp The Pirates Adventure with Scientists (or "band of misfits" for the anti-intellectual market) this autumn with Paranorman.  A project that seems to have a lot of geeks like me very very excited..

Just goes to show.  There's precious little point in making long term career plans.   I expect Will Vinton had a pretty decent plan once and while he's not exactly come out of it badly.....

An extraordinary exposition

The extraordinary tale of a firebird in spring.  It's a very long title for a short film - the script runs for just two pages!

Well, it came about in the dark weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year (When the weather is miserable and the days are short and everything is closed)  This has never been my time of year and having suffered a major bereavement in the autumn, I had fallen into contemplating the big questions and the devastation and chaos that losing someone brings.

I was working a lot in the last quarter of 2011 and I wasn't really dealing with any of these issues and, I have to confess, I had got myself into a bit of a mess by January.

I became interested in how people cope with this seemingly insatiable emotional pain and started wondering if there's a better recipe for learning to face it and to coming to terms with such a massive and inevitable disruption.  Death is a universal thing that we all encounter some time.   I looked into the rituals and customs that exist around the world.  I figured somebody must know how to do it properly!

Firebird is an exploration of approaches to grief inspired by a melting pot of ideas from faith, folklore and cognitive therapy.  It don't know that it answers any  questions, but at least it's got me out of winter.

Fire Away

I'm pleased to announce the beginning of photography on my little project:
"The extraordinary tale of a firebird in spring"

The stage is set.  The rest of the mountain and monastery will be filled in using an old technique called matte painting

My joy is marred only by the irritating fact that the deadline for completion was 1st April 2012 (Fools day, of course) The deadline for submission to the Golden Kuker festival in Bulgaria.  I think it's safe to say I've missed that.

It may be the wrong attitude to take but I'm not going to get concerned about missing deadlines.  There will be inevitable interruptions from things like work and the telephone and the pub and after all, there's no point in trying to rush these things.  Stop Motion Animation is a slow process and it takes as long as it takes.

 ...And, by the way,  it takes roughly five minutes to shoot each frame, so shooting twelve and a half frames per second, taking into account the average rate of interruptions being one every forty three frames, the completed five minute film should be ready by...  I've really no idea.  The best I can say is that It'll be finished some time in the future.

A monk stands in for lighting and camera before make up