Knock knock

News of the past few months coming soon. In the mean time, a postman!

Masterclass with Richard Haynes

A good friend of mine came down to Wales to do a three day stop-motion masterclass with students at International Film School Wales at the end of May. Richard Haynes is an animator and director who spent a great deal of time at Cosgrove Hall up in Manchester and is now at Aardman on the feature Pirates after having worked as an animator on the Shaun the Sheep series. I met Richard at Annecy festival a few years back and it was nice to catch up as he took us through an intensive character performance course.

Due to time constraints and resources we didn't have 3d puppets but were instead working with paper cut-outs and clay, focusing on movement, gesture and timing. The crash course included acting and performance workshops, timing exercises, walks and even pixillation so was a nice well-rounded opportunity to brush up on skills. There was a small group of us from BA and MA and I think everyone got a lot out of it. Richard was a helpful mix of both critical and enthusiastic and the masterclass was a nice end to the second year at the film school.

Jason and Medea

A quick piece of pro-mo visualisation I did for Jason and Medea (working title) a new show from Bristol Old Vic Young Company, directed by Tid. The piece will be a large ensemble production and is currently in development. The treatment transposes the greek myth to the crooked underbelly of 1960s London.

Pencil and digital collage.

Metropolis

After much anticipation, Kino International has announced the release of The Complete Metropolis. Fritz Lang's sci-fi masterpiece is in my opinion one of the most important films ever made; it broke new ground and took cinematic storytelling to a new level. The film was made in Germany in a fruitful period in-between the wars; around the same time as other classics such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The film pioneered some incredibly complex special effects calling upon photography tricks, mirrors, miniatures and stop-motion animation. At the time, all of the arts in Germany were richly connected and very much fed-off of each other and Metropolis drew heavily upon the aesthetics of abstract expressionism. The production values are simply stunning for the time and the influence of Metropolis reaches out across contemporary cinema from Tim Burton’s Batman to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and a more obvious homage in the recent La Antena by Argentinean director Esteban Sapir.

Above: the crew casually prod toy cars along the false-perspective roads for a stop-motion scene.

Fritz Lang’s wrote Metropolis with his wife Thea Von Harbou and the films epic production techniques were inspired by American working methods he was exposed to on a press tour for his previous film Die Niebelungen. Lang was fully aware of the films colossal ambition from the beginning, in fact it was his intention to create the biggest film to be made in Europe. It was shot outside Berlin on a huge lot belonging to UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) and featured an incredible 36,000 extras. The story of Metropolis is a tale of two worlds, of class and rank and of a man and a woman whose love bridges the gap in society. It also features an underground factory, a mad inventor, a bitter father and a huge flood. I’m hesitant to talk too much about the plot, just watch it, it’s brilliant!

The film has changed shape and form continually throughout its lifetime. Metropolis premiered in Berlin in 1927 after which the film was re-edited by German and American studio execs in a hope to make it more commercial. Despite the tampering, and Lang disregarding the new cut, it went down in cinema history. Strangely after this initial release it disappeared for several years. Next, in 1984, it was re-discovered, re-mastered, re-coloured and re-scored with disgusting bright colour-washes and a cringe-worthy 80s score. Finally in 2001, with help from film archives all over the world, Martin Koerber supervised a restoration which was thought would be the final, most comprehensive version. Missing footage was replaced with explanatory title-cards and the film was reunited with its original stirring score by Gottfried Huppertz.

However in 2008, the Museo Del Cine, in Buenos Aires, found a negative copy of Fritz Lang’s original vision containing the missing 25 minutes of footage. The new scenes, which make sense of the film’s staggered plot, were carefully restored and added to the 2001 renovation by the Murnau Foundation who deal with all Lang’s works. This new 2010 restoration took about a year to complete and we now have a print which is a definitive version of Lang's original film, an ultimate director’s cut if you like.

The Complete Metropolis, Lang’s comprehensive, fantastical epic, is now enjoying a tour of theatrical screenings before heading to DVD, the film’s final resting place in its full form for all to admire.


All images © 2010 Kino International

Fact

New Things

Here are my newly pressed and printed showreel DVDs, just in time for FMX festival in Stuttgart, Germany this week.

Plus I have a couple of new showreels on Youtube.
My Animated Film Showreel can be found here,
and my Character Performance Showreel can be found here.

Jan Pinkava

In other vaguely Czech animated news, Jan Pinkava is working on a feature film with Laika (presumably stop-motion as they shut down their CG department). Pinkava has had a very interesting career and is a truly international artist. He was born in Prague in 1963, a time when Švankmajer was making his first films, and the Czech film industry was active and fruitful with artists like Frantisek Vlacil and Milos Forman leading the way. Pinkava’s family moved to the UK in the late 60s and it was here that he was educated and started to play with animation.

He won an award for a short film of his on the BBC show Screen Test which brought him a lot of attention. Interested by the potentials of new technologies, he then went over to Wales to study computer science in Aberystwyth and stayed until he got a PhD. After a brief stint in London he was picked-up by Pixar in 1993 and made some award-winning commercials as well as working on their features. Geri’s Game, Pinkava first short at Pixar won the Oscar, as well as numerous other awards and really established him as a director. This gave him the impetus to begin developing a story of his into feature film. The story was about a rat on the streets of Paris who dreamed of being a chef…

Ratatouille (2007) © Disney / Pixar

This would of course later become the brilliant Ratatouille, but not without some turbulence. It’s unclear what really happened, and the Ratatouille DVD Extras provide little answers, but Pinkava was replaced as Director by Brad Bird, hot off the success of The Incredibles. Jan stayed briefly, demoted and then quit Pixar. Brad Bird is currently working on a live-action adaptation of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco called …1906. The exciting news regarding Jan Pinkava is that we should soon see more work from this skilled craftsman with the Laika film. I’m not sure if this is anything to do with the new features that Henry Selick is directing as I understood he had left Laika and was now working with Disney/Pixar and John Lasseter on creating at least three new stop-motion feature films. Many British animators over here are already packing their bags getting ready to go to the states for something. Time will tell.

Henry Selick with Coraline. Image. © Syfy 2010

Czech Adventure

I recently stumbled across the blog of Zoe Brooks, a community regeneration professional, who divides her time between the UK and Czech Republic. She writes about life in both countries, the culture etc. Inevitably she had touched on puppet animation and the cinematic traditions. But it was a post about an old castle that reminded me of something that happened to me a while ago…

I was in the Czech Republic a few years back and was keen to see if there were any museums or exhibitions displaying remnants of the rich puppet animation scene. This is a part of animation history that has long fascinated me and the works of Karel Zeman, Jiri Trnka, Břetislav Pojar, Jan Švankmajer and more recently Aurel Klimt, have proved a huge influence on my work.

After some lengthy research in internet cafés and the lobby of my hostel in Prague, I found out about the Museum of Czech Animated Films at Kratochvile Chateau or 'Pastime Castle' as it roughly translates. This was a permanent exhibition of works including a screening room, artwork, designs, puppets and sets from the past to the present. It sounded incredible and I got highly excited about what was going to be the singularly most inspiring trip of that year. The only problem was that this castle was quite far away… and by far away I mean it was outside a small village called Netolice literally in the middle of nowhere.

Slightly lost

The train journey, or rather three train journeys were set to take 6 hours to get there from Prague central station. Unfortunately I missed a connection and it took 9 hours. Never mind, I was too eager to care. I arrived at Netolice after having taken a train where I was the only passenger and had some difficulty explaining to the driver what an Inter-Rail ticket was as he spoke no English.

The chateau

I looked to the back of my hand where I’d drawn a map from Google… After a trek through a field in slightly the wrong direction I spotted the Italian-looking chateau down in the valley. I arrived at the entrance and the gentleman at the desk looked blank at my Czech greetings and presented a girl who spoke English. The conversation went a bit like this:
“Hello! How much is does it cost to go to the Museum of Animation?”
“Oh, that closed down a few years ago”.
*Stunned Silence.*

Apparently it had gone to a private collector and was now in storage. Very disappointing and unfortunate but it was still a beautiful guided tour around the castle. You can see a write up of the exhibition when it actually existed over on Animation World Network.

Illustrations

I've just done a few quick, little portraits of some of the Animation Sans Frontières participants for the new brochure. This is a course in Animation Production that I have recently completed. These illustrations were done over night and the others will be by Péter Vácz.

Animation Sans Frontières participants 2009-2010

Below is a bit of character design for a piece of puppet theatre for children I'm working on with Bristol-based artist of many talents Christopher Collier.

As you can see it's about Pirates and is currently in development.

Animation Lesson at Calon

A few weeks back I went to Calon’s stop-motion studio for the day to do some animating under the brilliant supervision of my mentor, the animator and director Ben Halliwell. Ben has animated all over the country on all sorts from The Wombles and Fireman Sam to Koala Brothers and Fantastic Mr Fox. We were doing some character performance exercises and it was time well spent. It was actually the first time I’d animated with a ball and socket puppet which was heaven. Ben watched the results and picked up on little things in my animation that I might miss and shared some of his wealth of experience. A valuable day, Ben’s very generous and a real genuine bloke.

Some images from the day (click the image to see in more detail).

Here’s a picture of Ben on the set of Calon's Igam Ogam which he directed.

Ben Halliwell. Photo.

Character Performance

I had wanted my puppet to walk into the space, falling under a spotlight, and notice the camera but unfortunately it turned out the armature was not strong enough to hold the clay I had covered it with. I guess you always have to use ball and socket when working with plasticine. Change of plan. I quickly built a box and made a pint glass for him to hold. He would now be propped up against a bar and would talk from there. I still managed to get movement out of the upper body to convey his character. Turned out ok and there were some nice bits but a few things still not quite right. Will post on YouTube soon.

Workshop with Barry Purves

Barry was really one of the first people I met in the industry and it couldn’t have been a more encouraging experience. I’d read his brilliant book Stop Motion:Passion, Process and Performance and was so inspired by the book I was compelled to email him. Now I didn’t necessarily expect an answer, I was just expressing what I got out of the book and sending my thanks and congratulations but reply he did. We first met at Annecy a few years back and made a connection over our interest in the relationship between stop-motion and theatre; Barry started off in theatre and still directs and designs now. Since meeting he’s been a source of inspiration and advice. I’m still amazed at how much of his time he gives to students and young filmmakers. He’s completely generous and really thoughtful.

He came down to Newport to do a workshop which I attended for a day before having to go and work on my film. We made some really simple black silhouette paper puppets with which to practice, accurate detailed walk cycles. I think everyone got a lot out of it and it was good discipline. Barry is very strict!

The exercises were similar to those he’d done at the Italian National School of Cinema in Turin a couple of years back when I’d gone with him to help out with a course he was teaching. I’ve posted the photos as they’ve never really seen the light of day. Very nostalgic looking back, I met some really great students there who I’m still in touch with now.

Barry’s new book Stop-Motion as part of AVA's 'Basics Animation' series comes out soon.

Basics Animation: Stop-motion, Ava Publishing

Lip Sync

I created a simple face at a reasonable size so I could get some detail for a lip sync exercise. Plasticine covering a bit of hard foam I had lying around in the studio. The mouths are clay sausages. I mounted the head on a bit of wire for the shoot so it was kind of looming in the darkness (the dialogue I was animating to is quite intimidating). I wanted to get a bit of movement into the head so it wasn’t too static. I did a few exercises with a little car playing with movement speed, follow-though etc.

It worked ok but the brow fluctuated a bit. When I do the character performance I need to be more disciplined with the brow movements.

Studio AKA and Royal College of Art

As soon as I got back from Budapest it was time for something else. I’d met a load of the guys from Studio AKA at Annecy 09 and had been invited to go and see the studio and hear about what they do which was a real pleasure having admired their work for so long. I’d organised a visit through the wonderful Ren Pesci and was lucky enough to be able to take a bunch of peers from the film school, notably the Annecy gang who are now all busy working on their graduation films.

We talked through the Studio’s history, their set-up and processes and saw a really interesting making of The Big Win commercial by the brilliant Marc Craste. We also got some inside info from the guy who made the sea in Philip Hunt’s epic and touching Lost and Found. We’d all seen the short in Annecy and sat through a lot of really bad work in the screening of children’s content before Lost and Found which is just beautiful, unpatronising, cinematic and heart-warming. Based on the book by a favourite children’s illustrator of mine Oliver Jeffers. The blog, featuring lots of lovely concept art and designs can be found here.
 
After AKA we went to have a look at Royal College of Art as Pete’s looking into places to do a masters. It seemed pretty buzzing, relaxed, ambitious, flexible. I’ve been thinking about post-grads recently, but I don’t want to do one yet and I don’t want to stay in the UK…

Animation Sans Frontieres Part Two: MOME. Budapest, Hungary

I travelled down to Hungary with Marie-Louise Højer Jensen who was just finishing a stint at Aardman working on Shaun the Sheep. She showed me some books by German illustrator Anke Feuchtenberger whose website can be found here.  There were a lot of qualities in here work that I liked; the use of colour, the expression of line and the play of light, light as definition, as sculpture.

Anke Feuchtenberger

We arrived in Budapest in the evening, supposedly to be met at  the airport by a chauffeur holding a sign on which our names would be printed. As it happened he was nowhere to be seen and it was only sometime later that we saw him from behind somewhat spoiling the illusion. We drove from the airport through the illuminated city to the North West where are hotel was situated. And what a hotel; complete with epic breakfast, pool, sauna, hot tub, and views of the mountains. Our rooms were more like apartments with kitchens, lounge etc. So there was no question of space like there was in Ludwigsburg although ironically we spent far little time in the hotel as there was far more going on in Budapest.

After a tour around Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design we  had the first of a series of lectures about animation in Eastern Europe. These were particularly interesting for me because I’ve always had a love for the films from this part of the world and the rich culture they evolved from and were a part of. In Hungary we looked at some early experiments mixing animation and live action and the all important George Pal who later moved to Hollywood with his Puppetoons – a technique he developed involving replacements. The lecturer Ferenc Fischer kindly copied me some of Pal’s shorts and commercials which is useful as they, like much work from this area are incredibly difficult to come by.

Michael Carrington from the Zlin animation school just outside Prague gave us a talk about the history of Czech animation which was particularly interesting because he really focused on some favourite filmmakers of mine. Out of all the films to come out of Easter Europe in the communist era some of my personal favourites are from former Czechoslovakia. Carrington talked about Hermína Týrlová, Karel Zamen and Yiří Trnka, bypassing the more obvious Švankmajer and Barta. He showed some really old works and talked about how the style developed, the specifics of the puppet animation, the hand-crafted quality and the desire to solve problems in camera. What was also brilliant was that he came right up to present day practice and talked about a director I really admire; Aurel Klimt and the fabulous Fimfarum series of films. There are two Fimfarum films and the third, we were told by Carrington, is in the process of being made. Based on the stories by Jan Lenika, they are feature film format but are made up of about 3 or 4 shorts. Brilliant for research and fascinating to get some in depth information about the development of a scene and a place I’m so passionate about.

FIMFARUM2. Image: Maurfilm

Sessions on the Eastern European market helped us to understand how and where things are being made and with what money. Chello Media of Central Europe talked about acquisition and programming and producer András Erkel took us through the production of animation in Hungary and beyond and how this has been affected politically over the years.

 
One of the brilliant things about the MOME module was that we were introduced to a bunch of new softwares just out of development. Tools to change the way you present information, pitch and think through ideas, to programs like SourceBinder, a tool for ‘prototyping and real-time tuning of flash based visual applications’. It doesn’t mean I’m going to suddenly start making films in a new way but to be exposed to these methods, ways of working and perhaps more importantly, ways of thinking is really valuable for my practice.

Arguably the most valuable of all these software-related discoveries was from Flavio Perez, another ASF participant. Flavio invited me to use GoogleWave, a new application from everyone’s favourite inventors the Google team. GoogleWave, still in a slightly fragile Beta stage is like a cross between Sykpe, email, and a flow chart. It can be used to map out projects, collaborate in real time, post and share anything from videos to sounds, draw attention to certain items, re-edit posts and texts and boasts a playback mode where you can watch the project grow and develop and see exactly where and when items and posts have been added. I promise I’m not secretly working for Google, I’m just excited about it. I’ve started appropriating it straight away with Chris Gylee and Adam Peck as a platform to further develop The Cutting Room from wherever we might be.

There was an emphasis in Budapest on style and technique. Many of the student films they screened from the film were really unique in their approach and aesthetic. Rastko Ciric, a professor from Serbia shared some slightly dubious work from his school and discussed individual style and the voice of a director in animated filmmaking. Tamás Waliczky, veritable pioneer of CG animation gave a riveting lecture about the development of the form, its possibilities and the balance between art and technology.

A special screening of Panique au Village held for us in an art cinema thanks to

Falvai Györgyi from MOME who also works for the company who distributed this movie.

We had a couple of ideas development sessions with script editor and dramaturge Rita Domonyi who took us through a bunch of writing exercises, drawing on inspiration from photographs and text for adaptation. There were several pitches involved in this workshop which was really useful, I’m finding I’m getting a lot more confident with presenting in this format and also being able to discuss protect and stand up for the projects pitched. Should come in handy soon…

Pitching time. Photo: Laetitia Grandjean

Case studies by filmmakers gave us an insight into the minds of creators from places such as Poland, Switzerland and Russia. Tomasz Bagiński of Platige Image, Poland talked through his successes as a filmmaker and talked about the process he adopts when making films from getting the design right to finalizing an edit.

The first of the two highlights of the MOME module has to be Jonas Raeber of SWAMP in Switzerland. Jonas’s talk was entitled: ‘Relations and Dependencies: Conceptual Aspects of Animation’ and covered everything from what makes a successful film and the consideration of audiences to ‘budgeting made easy’ and a breakdown of production. The second highlight was Russian born Alexei Alexeev, creator of the well-known Log Jam. He came to discuss his experiences creating the first short KJFG No5 and the development of an idea from start to finish. Alexeev now works for Studio Baestarts in Budapest, strangely directed the Mr Bean cartoon and is as funny and as entertaining as his films. Studio Visits
Cinemon work mostly in traditional hand drawn animation as well as digital cut out for some of their work for children. They produce various content from series to feature films. The driving force behind the studio is producer Réka Temple whose working philosophy was sound and inspiring. The studio was based in an old house with a wooden conservatory used as a meeting room and was situated within a large, sprawling garden. Temple spoke to us about her experiences of working with directors, getting projects off the ground and co-productions in Europe.

The second studio was Lichthof Productions, based in a very cool ‘up-and-coming’ part of the city surrounded by fashionable eateries and bars where instead of a roaring fire, central heating and a carefully placed plasma TV displaying a roaring fire are slightly more chic. Lichthof is the home of Hungary’s no1 animator Áron Gauder who directed the gritty urban animated  feature The District for those who caught that on the festival circuit a couple of years back. He’s now hard at work on his new feature Egil: The Last Pagan, a vicious tale of Viking warfare. Gauder usually works in digital cut out and CG but the part I found interesting about this project came from a connection with the Polish company Se-ma-for.

The biggest studio in Poland, Se-ma-for were responsible for, under Suzie Templeton’s inspired vision, creating the 2006 hit Peter and the Wolf. After a lack of work for the stop motion animators Gauder invited them to Budapest to animate armatures which had tiny motion capture rigs attached to them, feeding directly into a computer. The movements that the animators gave the puppets then created a skeleton movement which a CG character could then be laid over. This technique apparently saves time on a lengthy rigging process and also gives the CG a certain stop-mo quality, to which I have to quote Mette Ilene Holmriis from the animation workshop, who called it so elegantly “staccato”.






You can read more about the technique and watch a video of the process on their website here.


We joined the illuminati of the Hungarian animation industry (mostly made up of our lecturers) at the opening ceremony of Anilogue, an annual animated film festival for a screening of Adam Elliot’s masterful Mary and Max. There was much excitement for those who hadn’t seen it. It was my second viewing and it astounded me once again. It's not just a brilliant animation but it's a genuinely brilliant film. The use of stop motion makes the whole thing seem completely living and grounded; the light the textures, the economy of the movement. Elliot has a real talent for making us engage and empathize with lumps of plasticine. Simply genius cinematic storytelling.

Mary and Max (2009) Dir. Adam Elliot. © Melodrama Pictures