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.