Trailers (for sale or rent)

making posters is an even more specialist skill!

A friend suggested I really should be using instagram - for videos - which means 15 second cuts: as if 1 minute wasn't enough of a challenge...
I started by trying to make a 15 second narrative (which in a couple of cases was actually possible as they had started out extremely short and with a fairly non-narrative kind of narrative) but for most of the ideas, the challenge was finding the good bits (visual) weren't necessarily the good bits of narrative. It emphasised the inseparable nature of the visuals and the narrative - which is good - but also helped with thinking about how shots or ideas could be re-ordered without unravelling the story. Some film festivals ask for trailers, and I always think...that's mad, a trailer for a 2 minute movie...but actually that is a more helpful way of looking at 15 seconds extracted from a short short. It's not about condensing the whole story... or extracting the "best" 15 seconds of visuals (because that may not tell a story, may not have pace... oh wait, how can they be the best visuals if they dont have pace? Then they are only 2 dimensional). So a better comparison/ starting point might be to look at the images I chose to extract for the screenshot web pages - a series of images which tell parts of the story but don't reveal the ending, and which are chosen for their variety as well as the strength of the images themselves, and the way they carry the narrative sense. But trying to put them together as a series of sequences rather than stills...aaaargh! Starting to really appreciate why storyboarding is a specialist skill and so is producing trailers.
UPDATE: a very useful training session from Tom Armitage, via Northern Film and Media, about creative ways to use the web to promote/ contextualise/ raise interest in/ support and reinforce your film work... I think I might actually be heading in the right direction...

Taking your ideas for a walk

...well no, nothing to do with fractals, tiny round islands or things not being what they seem. In fact the next film idea turns out to be about treadmills, repetition, and mechanical wind-up toys. Kafka and Tim Burton hang out in The Magic Roundabout. I suppose, if I had a brief...a client, a commission... I could start from there and it would be fractals all the way but if it's up to me then I can go any direction that moves me. The trick is not to dither endlessly or keep on the track if it has evidently become a dead-end. And here, perhaps the representation of rigidity, pre-determination and escape attempts owes something to a re-examining of my own routines. A need for structure. versus the joy of freefall. Well, watch this space to see whether the inner teenager or the inner parent will win.
But there is something so great about the wonky scale of tin toys - the massive heads, the tiny legs, the gigantic winding keys that makes even a kafka-esque nightmare landscape jolly. Even without the lurid, and slightly wobbly-edged colours.
I'm attempting a short movie that has NO pre-planning - taking a line for several walks (25 each second, but in slow motion spread over days). Free-range...No storyboard. No efficiencies or  "if I'd realised I wanted to wiggle those fingers I'd have drawn the hands on another layer". So time is wasted. But - I hear you ask - is time spent making art and learning how to do both the process and the end product better, ever wasted? I think not.

Comix!

The next big adventure came rather sooner than I planned - the adaptation of one of the tiny Shakespeare animations into a comic. The whole story.

 Interesting how you can get away with a certain amount of disconnect in an animation - two parallel strands of story that you switch between...even in a very short short; but that this immediately becomes confusing in a comic strip. You almost feel as though you want to put dirty great arrows on to say - look this bit follows this line of thought. Then you realise a more grown-up way to do this would be by mirroring some aspects of the visual. Pose, face...easy(?) when you can cut and paste. And then you are forcibly reminded that whilst in a storyboard every frame is exactly the same size and aspect ratio, that is a VERY dull way to compose a cartoon strip. But...those are the drawings you have to work with.
Actually, strip cartoons and old fashioned comics often use a standard size/shape, but have Batman Marvel forever spoilt that by leading us to expect dynamic, different-sized, non-rectangular...? Ooh wait, this goes with my earlier ideas about changing sizes and shapes of screen in a movie...There's probably a really nice piece of software that helps with the creation, measuring, balancing of different frames; but I probably wouldn't use it!
So now I get to re-read my favourite comic books, Fun Home (Alison Bechdel) and Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi), plus anything by Scott McCloud - this time looking at the shape of the boxes. And so many different ways to explore this particular range of adaptation...

Community of Practice Revisited

animating painting...

Last week I had a random tutorial with a Masters student... from a course I don't actually teach on.
From a different subject area.
Except that we are both painters now trying to make animations. Trying to animate paintings.

OK, it was his first and my Nth, but while I was talking I realised both how much I had learnt since MY first - and how much I still had to learn; how many things I had to try and to explore...

He was doing things "properly" - storyboards, pencil tests, animatics (I had to look it up to even find out what an animatic was); I seem to have made an artistic career out of doing things improperly. But what was interesting was not which set of processes we each were using so much as how the process affects the form. In painting there are always happy accidents, interesting marks and ways in which the paint reacts with the surface, the solvent, the other paint.It isn't so easy to see but there are ways in which a technical or computer process also affects the form, and offers opportunities for random accidents of inspiration. Where the problems and frustrations - or the need to save time - generate creative solutions.
We talked about the different demands of learning as much as possible through the project, and of completing a fabulous movie...that old thing of process vs product but somehow still hugely relevant, hugely important to remember. We say that the learning is vital...that it's research...but are we maybe too keen to steer our students  - and our practice - towards the perfect product?

We always say - especially to the students - that teaching is an exchange, that we learn from the process just as the students do. That this is a community of practice in which we can all help each other to grow and develop;  to reflect on our own practice and where it fits with other peoples'. So it was nice to be reminded that that does actually work. Cheers, Christopher...

Scripts, image sequences and videotape

Working on the scripts for the Shakespeare shorts has made me realise how much fun it is to work in a different medium. To explore telling a story through multiple perspectives but using words/ and different voices.
To find creative ways of avoiding too much lip-synching but without resorting to a disembodied narrator...through close-ups, cutaways...keeping the story visual and not letting the images become secondary to the words. I find this means the script changes as I go, as interesting visuals suggest themselves. Forgive me (colleagues) but I seldom stick to a storyboard and seldom even draw one. Its mostly back-of-the-beer-mat/ organic flow - or as we professionals call it Zen Animation!

But...I have only just realised -while updating the website - that every narrative I create is also told (differently) through a series of still images (the thumbnails) which compose a sort of trailer in comic-book form. In fact, another adaptation.
Damn. Now I've realised that, I'm going to have to start being more creative with the shape/ layout/ size of the thumbnails.
Maybe with speech bubbles...

What did we learn today?

Normally, I work from beginning to end, perhaps more like writing a novel than making a film. I make a first draft - seldom a pencil test unless it's really hard to draw - and then go back over it, to re-edit, also in order beginning to end. BUT - Just because it's a cartoon, doesn't mean you can't shoot it out of sequence. So, what did we learn today... stop banging your head against the sketchbook going "wah! it's too hard to draw a little fat man doing 360 degree rolls in mid air" and - duh - move on to to the part where he's admiring his wings in the mirror. Go back to the hard part when you are feeling more energetic, have better references...or maybe rethink the sequence based on what it is supposed to show/generate/ suggest. Of course this does imply you have to have a reasonable idea where the story is going...

A proper storyboard is not in fact essential unless you want to ...maybe, work to a pre-planned deadline.
Lately I have  started annotating the cartoon-in-progress with days so I can see how many frames I actually managed in that period. This will be an invaluable aid to planning and resource budgetting  - or possibly invoke despair.