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