This isn’t strictly a “Stina & the Wolf” post, because its about another film project, but in many ways it is, as it’s developing the groundwork and experience for how we will tackle the film once the budget has finally been arranged. (Still a few years to go on that; a few more modestly budgeted films need to be in the can first.)

The film our production company Pipecatcher Films Ltd. is tackling first is called DEAD HEAD WOOD:

Poster design & awards for the “Dead Head Wood” script

It’s a scary, nostalgic, time-twisting thriller set during a sweltering hot summer in 1970s England in a small rural town: a time and place where kids could lose themselves in woods and meadows and countryside adventures.

Ancient woodland at our primary location in Romsey, Hampshire, UK

It’s a place far away from the constraints of adult control, but also from the things that keep children safe, and not lording it over each other like flies.

Still from the “Dead Head Wood” funding pitch deck 

One of the reasons we chose this project from a range of possible scripts was it that it can all be done locally, and well, on a small budget and utilize the glorious countryside around us in Hampshire, UK; a place still full of ancient woods and wild fields where you can really lose yourself.

On location with our Canon c200 cinema camera with 70-200 lens. Grade: CLog c200 to Arri LUT

It’s replete with hidden moss-covered ruins and abandoned WWII bunkers. Much of it has hardly changed in hundreds of years. It’s a place that still tempts you off the beaten track into a world of outdoor freedom and adventure that I still vividly remember from my own 1970s childhood. And it’s all still there… waiting to be rediscovered…

Still from the “Dead Head Wood” funding pitch deck 

We’ve now bought most of the kit we need (gulp) and are slowly assembling a small crew based around a core of seasoned professionals (and some who are still being seasoned).

Putting the new gear through its paces on location.

We are also really taking our time to explore the possibilities of the script using Previz. Having worked on Previz for a number of big Hollywood projects I’m keenly aware of its potential, particularly how valuable it could be for planning smaller budget projects like ours. So far it’s been an amazing experience and has really given us a chance to dream and play with how we want to tell the story; really get to the heart of each scene. So far we’ve completed 1 hour out of what will be approximately a 2 hour run time, so we’re about half way there.

Previz stills from “Dead Head Wood”

One useful addition to the process has been the ability to convert the script pages into read dialogue using a handy phone App called TABLEREAD . I highly recommend it to any independent film makers out there, as it allows you to add a range of voices to get your script (formatted properly!) into a rough audio dialogue format quickly. (It also allows you to really alienate your perspective and experience your script in a way you haven’t before – Brilliant for honing those rewrites; the place where the real magic happens!) We’ve been adding this dialogue into our Previz as we go, and then feeding ideas developed in the Previz back into the script.

Doing the Previz has also given us the confidence to approach our next stage: planning how we are going to tackle the actual logistical requirements of the shoot. It helps give us a clear insight into everything from actor blocking, to set dressing and production design requirements to practical effects and location. (We’re using CELTX for the next planning stage).

So this brings me to how this all relates to the title of this site. Well, as we’ve already done a tremendous amount of work on the “Stina & the Wolf” location scouting and other pre-production, it’s made it clear what our next stage should be for that project: Previz. And this current film is forming the template for how we will approach it, particularly as the Stina project is scoped to shoot across locations in north and south UK, as well as our primary location in Switzerland. It’s really going to help get us a tight cut that we can use to simplify the logistics and keep the budget as low as humanly possible. (A must if your planning to film in Switzerland. Those fondues don’t come cheap!)

Cheese

Also, I’m just super excited about revisiting the script for “Stina & the Wolf” once we wrap on “Dead Head Wood”, as it will allow us to jump back into that dream all over again, and spend more time visualising the characters, the story and the locations in a world I just love exploring 🙂

Manlichen, Switzerland

That’s all for now!

Paul

More details on Pipecatcher films and it’s projects can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/PipecatcherFilms/

Since making the decision to make “Stina & the Wolf” as a completely live-action feature film, we have had to totally rethink our approach to the project. We have a wealth of concept art, as well as a script we are very confident in, (and that has ticked the required industry boxes) and a 2-hour mocap/storyboard rough-cut of the whole film made with our amazing original Stina actress: Becky Waldron, and a great ensemble cast that will serve as a template for what we want to achieve story and performance-wise.

Stills from the “Stina and the Wolf ” Mocap Drama Cut

Concept art from “Stina and the Wolf “

Concept art from “Stina and the Wolf “

The first big question we had to ask ourselves was: Where on earth is Stina’s world? CGI and matte paintings allow for limitless freedom of imagination, but the real world has limits, (and permit requirements!) and initially I wasn’t convinced there was anywhere that could match up to our original concepts, with its combination of lush grass, absurdly high vistas, huge clouds, and often snowy peaks all in the same shot. So our first task was scourer the world for this mythical place. We spent the first few months location scouting and begin the long process of creating a completely new, live-action budget from scratch. The needs of an animated film and a live-action film are very different, and this has been a massive learning curve, as well as a very complex and detail ridden process (Involving spreadsheets bigger than I ever thought were humanly possible!)

A seasoned producer I’ve been working with on another live-action feature I’m directing (A US production, temporarily stalled, unfortunately, due to COVID19) has been giving me some invaluable guidance into the complex world of live-action feature planning and budgeting. Our plan has been to come up with a number of different budget versions for different marketplaces and see what looks feasible in the current climate (post-lockdown, obviously!) It has also been a useful exercise in assessing whether the film we want to make is even possible with the kind of budgets we could realistically achieve. (There is a distinct chance that this film may have to wait on entering full production until a few other projects have wrapped, so the director can accrue enough industry cachet to get a budget high enough to do it justice! There is no point in making this feature unless it can realise at least some of its potential on the big screen.)

As well as being a planning and logistics exercise, this process has been really useful for drilling down into the detail of the creative decisions you need to make as a live-action filmmaker: on everything from the artistic and practical (and cost!) implications of production design, to the cinematography potential of locations, right down to the nuts and bolts of day-to-day shooting: “are there any toilets nearby?” , “is there an interior shoot we could do that day if it rains on our exterior location?” , “Are you actually allowed to fly drones there anyway? It’s next to an airport!”. It’s all a very different world from the one I’d previously inhabited (where most production questions seem to boil down to: “Can we get a bigger render farm?”.) One exciting thing that has happened during this process is that we have really taken the scenes and locations off the page and placed them into the world; as they go from ideas packed with potential to real, tangible places. And boy did we find some amazing places!

The most expensive part of a live-action film process is the shoot. The more money you have the more locations you can have and the more expensive actors you can have etc. etc. One big factor in keeping the cost down is to have as few locations as possible; so we had to first nail down our biggest issue:

Where are we going to shoot? Does the location we want even exist in our world?

..and if so, how easy is it to get there? And how many days shooting could we really afford? For us, a big challenge was to find places that captured the grandeur and beauty of our CGI visualisations, but wouldn’t require the same expensive CGI heavy augmentations of a James Cameron film. This was one of the main problems with the CGI Stina (and the main reason we switched to live-action): there was no real way of it not costing the same as Avatar! Also, how do you location scout with next-to-no pre-production budget?  This is where technology stepped in. We are now at the point in computer graphics where you can visit, in virtual reality, almost any place on earth. So that’s what we did. I have a Vive VR headset, and using the amazing Google Earth VR we set about travelling around the world looking at hundreds and hundreds of different locations.

Google Earth VR (Image: Google)

Rio in Google VR (Image: Google)

Good VR can really give you a sense of place and scale. The ability of Google Earth to change the time of day even allowed us to make decisions based on our cinematography style; we could check instantly whether the sunset would fall over the right mountain, or even if we could get the natural rim-lighting we are after with mountainous ariel occlusion fading off behind us.

So, after months of searching through Europe, Asia, America (and of course New Zealand!), we found Stina’s world: the Bernese Alps in Switzerland. There is something about the combination of extreme verticality, not present anywhere else in Europe, and the simultaneous existence of lush green grass and epic snowy peaks that just made it perfect. This is Stina’s world. With a few CGI tweaks (a couple of buildings and a cable car removed and a light grade) we are already in Stina’s original field:

Original image from Google Earth (by Stuart Brown©2020)

Original image from Google Earth©2020

Now that we had the country, the next process was to go through every single scene in the film and match it with a specific location that was feasible to work in, film in and travel to, all from a single (and not too expensive!) central location. We decided on an area of about 30 miles in diameter in the middle of the Berneses Alps that had everything we needed and was easily accessible: Lush green meadows, Stina’s aunt’s house (filming permissions pending) snowy mountain tops, epic vistas. The locations have a sense of both immense beauty and peace, and the sublime terror and sense of overwhelming insignificance you get when you put tiny little humans in ridiculously big mountain ranges; it’s a place where you could be at total peace one minute and overwhelmed by terror the next.

I had planned to travel to the location for a few weeks of real scouting in May (as visiting a location is a must for logistical as well as artistic planning) but unfortunately Switzerland was one of the first countries to fall prey to COVID 19, so will be visiting after the lockdown ends.

Here are a few of the stunning Berneses Alps locations courtesy of Goole Earth 360°. We scoured every corner of the earth for Stina’s homeworld, and we found it 🙂

Männlichen:

https://goo.gl/maps/TD8QdMELwdxadyTZ9

https://goo.gl/maps/yfCyno42KthTue2g6

Jungfraujoch:

https://goo.gl/maps/43pM3md1Asrt1TGv9

Grindlewald:

https://goo.gl/maps/HyMHTF4uyGdf14Rs8

https://goo.gl/maps/tbwU6racvYdapFqFA

https://goo.gl/maps/5PPCBJcvFcWc22d56

With all the locations bookmarked in one place, we now have an easy way to measure distances, check accessibility, plot routes and share information with the entire cast and crew from anywhere:

Google Earth Switzerland locations – “Stina & the Wolf”

Switzerland is an undeniably expensive country to shoot in, so one of the first decisions we made was to find a location in the UK to do all the filming in where the script doesn’t actually require us to look at the mountain environment. As well as interior scenes, If someone is walking down a road with a cliff behind them, but no vista, It makes sense to get your eye-candy B Roll to cut-in from the expensive location using as few actors and crew as possible, whilst you do all your close-ups etc. where it’s cheaper (being careful to match the light of course; Milton Keynes Waitrose car park in November will never feel like the Swiss Alps in May!) So we settled on 2 locations. We are hoping to take advantage of some tax breaks to help budget the film as a joint Swiss-UK production.  I won’t be revealing where the UK location is yet, as it’s subject to negotiations with assorted parties about filming permission, so may move, but we’re hoping it will be in north England, close to the Scottish border.

We are now at the stage where we have a good idea of total shooting days (8 in Swizerland/27 in the UK) and detailed breakdowns of every location, set, prop, costume, actor, CGI/practical effect, and travel requirement for every scene. The next stage is to drill down even further into the real detail of costings and logistics (what kind of filling would you like in your sandwich Mr Director? Lobster Thermidor?) and see what figures we end up with. Once that’s completed, we can start chipping away to get our various different budget proposals to match with different market places, and move forward to the finance and fund-raising stages.

Planning a film of this scope is by far the most complex (and sometimes overwhelmingly imposable seeming)  thing I have ever attempted, but with every location found, every corner cut to save a little bit more money, every tiny, seemingly insignificant detail ticked off, it all, very slowly, seems more and more feasible.

(if anyone wants to start looking into this process for their own projects, the book to start with, and that was recommended by my experienced producer friend is “Film and Video budgets by Deke Simon”: a tome that’s simultaneously terrifying, and reassuringly detailed and informative.)

Paul

Very excited to have been selected for “Art of Brooklyn Film Festival”, which is online this year due to COVID 19.

Check out the site here: FESTIVAL SITE

Look’s like it going to be a great festival! Our poster is getting pretty crowded now 🙂

Check out our new trailer for it here:

I’ve been quiet for a few months now, as we’ve been busy reaching the end of our script development phase. We’ve now reached a point where i’m really, really excited about our final script and confident in its quality and suitability for the professional film market place. We’ll be pushing it forward to as many people as possible over the next few months, and hope to take the project to the next stage in production.

It’s a long road to a finished script, partly because as a writer, one of the most important (and often overlooked) stages is detaching yourself from the work, so you can revisit it later, fresh and objective. There is no short cut to that state of objectivity, aside from time. For me, I needed to leave at least a month between drafts, to really see with fresh eyes whether the changes or additions actually achieved what i wanted them to.

We have also now pushed our script into the “real world” of professional feature development, which is one of the reasons we decided to do a complete rewrite a few years back, as early industry feedback made it clear there was lots we could do to strengthen it.

Nothing sets your objectivity meter back to zero like giving it to a professional screenplay editor to read. They spend every day of their working lives reading and tweaking professional TV and feature scripts for final translation to the screen (turns out this process is a lot more ubiquitous than I realised). In our case we found one who was happy to give us notes for a massively reduced fee, as he was a friend of friend. The experience has proved invaluable and it has really strengthened the work.

What has been particularity exciting for our second-to-last draft was getting this recent round of feedback.  It was extremely encouraging and gives me a lot of confidence for sharing it with producers to kick start the next phase of production.  As well as giving us some very valuable insights, which have really strengthened the final draft, he also said the following:

“for such a cinematic and fictional script, it reads phenomenally well off the page. Which is often a big hurdle with films of this genre.”

“I can say that this script reads very fluidly off the page. Despite the surrealist element and otherworldly experiences the through line remains clear and present in the text. Ensuring your script retains clarity so any layman could pick it up and be able to walk away with an understanding of your story is crucial, which you’ve accomplished here. Various moments that could use tidying will be identified by me, but on the whole the script is in a very good place.”

“Congratulations… an engaging and exciting script.”

Obviously, I’ve cherry-picked the best bits here, but the “tidying” elements he mentions dive into details about plot and character I don’t really want to share yet, for obvious reasons.

Everyone’s opinions are subjective, but it was clear from a previous screenplay of mine that he’d worked on, that he is incredibly insightful, particularly as a dramaturge,  and has that very rare skill of critiquing a work in a way that tries to focus and develop the specific vision of the artist, not impose a totally new one. (As an educator i’m acutely aware what a difficult and valuable skill that is.) We are very grateful for his insights and suggestions, and i’ll credit him in future posts, if he’s happy for me to do that.

So having completed our final draft, I shall be approaching producers, entering screenplay competitions & festivals (If we can win or get nominated for a few good ones it will make tempting a producer to read it a damn sight easier) I’ll also be continuing to direct animations to improve my film making skills.  (I may have a big, properly funded and very exciting feature project coming up in the new year, partly as a result of the success of “Uncle Griot”, which could really help the long term development plans for “Stina & the Wolf”)

We’re getting there, slowly, but surely.

Paul

Anybody who wants to the read the script and thinks they can help us forward it on to a producer, or help the project develop to the next stage, feel free to email me for a copy (you will need to sign an NDA) : wotty33@hotmail.com

It’s been an action packed summer for the Stina project. I’ve been holding off on writing a blog about it, as I wanted to get to a point where we could take a breath and reflect on all that has happened, what it all means and where we are now in the project.  There have been high points and low points and a lot learned. This will be a longer piece than usual, as there is so much to cover and I’ll break it up into roughly chronological sections.

Cannes Film Festival 

Site of our first meeting – “English Pavilion” behind the “Palais des Festivals” Screening Area.

When we first got accepted to the “Court Metrage” at the “Festival de Cannes”  we were very excited. This is the biggest art house film festival in the world, and many of my favorite films, and ones that have been a big influence on our production such as “The Conversation”, “Paris Texas”,”Mulholland Drive”, “Picnic at Hanging Rock” have won big prizes here. We are very proud of our short film “Uncle Griot”, which although not able to compete against fully formed 15 minute short films, (ours is only 5 minutes long, and assembled from a single scene in the feature)  works well as an atmospheric slice of our feature production, with enough ideas and emotion to at the very least leave the audience with a lot of questions, if not all of the answers. So when it appeared in the official Cannes catalogue alongside works from well known directors it was a real buzz. Our intention was always to use it as a tool to open doors to help the feature development and hopefully interest a producer enough to come onboard and help with our next stage of funding.  It  became clear though, after collating assorted and often contradictory views on the festival, that acceptance to “Court Metrage”, although framed as an opportunity only open to those who have a project that is quantifiably “art house”, it is in fact simply a pay-to-attend market place, where thousands of short film makers try and forge a career or, as in our case, battle to get funding for their feature development. It isn’t, as it initially appeared, any kind of stamp of approval on the quality of your film. We were to be an incredibly small fish in a very large ocean of highly seasoned, and extremely busy producers, sales agents and distributors, and lots of other very talented filmmakers, (who are all trying to compete for the same limited funding and opportunities.) As a result of realizing this we did as much research as we could before we left, to try and make the best use of our time.  One thing that became clear was that there is no point going to Cannes unless you do the leg work to arrange meetings before you go, as most producers have filled their schedules before their planes even touch down. This was a very new world to me. My experience in the film industry has always been on the filmmaking side and never on the film producing or funding side, so it was an intimidating first step.

“Uncle Griot” Cannes Catalog Entry.

The first stage was to “reach out” (a phrase I used a lot for the next 3 months), to as many people as I could to help us. A thing we learnt quickly was the importance of knowing exactly what you are asking for and what, specifically, you are offering. Film producers, sales agents and distributors deal with hundreds of cold callers and have neither the time nor the inclination to humor unprepared newcomers. So to this end I embarked on as thorough a research and costing of our entire feature production as I could. Amongst my most useful meetings was a chat with the head of feature animation development at Double Negative, who as well as generously giving me a lot of his time, gave me a lot of good advice on the language a producer expects to hear in regard to animated film costing (The currency is seconds per week; 3 for feature quality, 6 for TV, and so on). I also approached the company REALTIMEUK to help us cost a version of the production done with the UNREAL game engine (more on this later) as using a game engine had the potential to bring the costs down to a manageable level.

So, what is a manageable level? This is the million dollar question (probably more). Up until this point our production had existed in a safe university bubble. We had been developing at our our own very slow, but comfortable pace, but the reality of finishing a production as complex as this without it taking 50 years, is that at some point you need a big injection of cash. There is no real way around that, down simply to the volume of work required to service a 2 hour film. My research on this led me to a number of areas that need to be fleshed out. The first area was the basic marketing one. In selling a film to a producer, distributor or sales agent, by far the most important thing is to know is where the market for the film is, and whether it can realistically provide enough budget for your production. The second concern is: why should the producer trust your skills? And why should they believe your specific film will make the investors any more return than any other projects on their desk? These two areas can be summed up in two words: “Reputation” and “Return”.  Almost every producer we spoke to before and during Cannes, at some point, uttered these two words.

To tackle the cost of our production we looked at recent similar film projects. There is a precedent for cost-saving productions using the Unreal game engine. One such film is the recent “Allahyar and the Legend of Markhor “.  The production company have been very coy about their actual production costs for this film, but it is well known that it was substantially cheaper than similar traditionally made CGI feature projects. We initially worked with UNREALUK to help us cost this, but unfortunately they couldn’t provide us with a quote in time as they were in the middle of multiple big productions, so we looked for other assorted reference sources and came up with an initial budget for the whole feature. This figure assumed we would be using Unreal and was based on a breakdown of animation, modelling, rigging, VFX, tools, production, foley, mixing and grading guided by our assemble of the film (a 110 minute long cut constructed from on-set reference footage, storyboards and concept art) It came to $2.5 million. This would pay for a small professional animation studio, staffed with junior- to mid-level artists and a few seniors working for two years. It would also allow us to formalise the student contribution, by running year-long paid placements as part of the degree program. This budget sits well in the indie horror market, which is a realistic genre to pitch to, given our content . “The Company of Wolves”, a film that shares some thematic similarities with our film was also marketed as a horror film, even though it’s predominantly an Art House experiment. So this approach can work and stay true to both the marketplace and the work.

Our poster and part of our “Pitch Deck” for the “Stina & the Wolf” horror pitch.

The indie horror market in particular can accommodate films budgeted between $500K and $3 million, which can generate at least $10 million in Producer’s Net Profit with Income Streams: 28% from theatrical, 60% from home video and 11% from TV and other ancillary income. This could also provide an indication of our distribution approach. Lessons from research into these lower budget films also told us we should look for “good actors, not big stars, and do the same with all of the technical crew on a film”. This, fortunately,  is a fairly accurate description of our project: great performances and visuals,but absolutely no-one famous involved!

So, with all this information, a “pitch deck” on our Ipad and a single meeting I’d managed to setup with a producer I’d managed to wrangle from existing contacts I have in the film industry from my VFX days (after countless fruitless other attempts by email and phone to assorted production companies) Alex and I headed off to Cannes, feeling a bit like 2 Mr Benns having taken the producers outfit off the rack,  slipped through the shop doorway and disappeared into a new and very surreal world.

Paul and Alex pretend to be in the film industry.

On arriving at Cannes our meeting was immediately postponed to the following day due to what sounded like a stressed and overworked producer juggling a production disaster unfolding in real-time on her main Cannes film project. We had definitely arrived at the chaos-center of the film industry. Her film was to be a big highlight of the festival, and last minute hitches in its world wide release were apparently causing release-busting problems. The next day we got our meeting, albeit with a few breaks for emergency fire-fighting calls to various parts of the globe.  It was useful, and she was very direct. She made it clear the kind of film we were trying to fund had no chance of US funding, no chance of a traditional animation feature blockbuster funding (no stars/No award winning director/writer) but sounded like a good potential fit for the “Asian market”. For the following days we attended as many assorted networking events as we could and learned about the feature production world, and how its various parts fit together (or don’t!). Again and again we were told our film fitted into the “Asian market”. After a week of this we came away somewhat shell shocked. The experience of coming in as newcomers to a such a complex and established market place was a little overwhelming, and for the most part we were out of our comfort zone, and out of our depth. Also the festival as a whole (some great films aside) felt somewhat flat and even a little paranoid, as it was trying to reinvent itself and re-commodify its “glamour” in the light of the Harvey Weinstein affair (one taxi driver told us that it was the Weinstein entourage that pretty much made the festival every year, and as a result many of the usual crowds of American tourists were absent) The festival is trying to find its way in response to the “#meto” movement. And rightly so.

Queuing starts outside the “Palais des Festivals”

All in all the film industry circus in Cannes is not a place for the faint hearted, or the inexperienced. It’s a place where established film producers and distributors negotiate deals with established award winning film makers. (A lot of whom do all of their deals and leave the week before Court Metrage even begins, as they aren’t interested in sifting through the hundreds of short film makers) We didn’t find a producer in the end. This was a baptism of fire, but also an extremely valuable learning experience and one that will definitely inform the rest of our production. We are now equipt to talk to producers in a language they understand, and are now actively investigating the much lauded “Asian market” to see if this is indeed where our future lies.

Siggraph 2018, Vancouver 

Alex chats to another speaker as the room starts to fill up ahead of our talk. (It filled up, honest!)

As well as dipping its toe into the hectic world of film funding, the project has also been delivering on its academic and research objectives. This was our third trip to Siggraph, but this time we actually had a paper to present. We were very surprised and pleased to have our submission accepted in the “Arts Paper” section. (The competition is pretty fierce at Siggraph, as its the leading international conference for Computer Graphics, Animation and Visual Effects) . The paper dealt with some of our funding challenges, as well as getting into the thematic and narrative ideas at the heart of the film. On a personal level, it was great to get back to some of the ideas in the actual story, as opposed to the funding and contractual aspects we’d been obsessing about all summer. (Definitely not my natural skill-set!)

Our paper as it appeared in the M.I.T.  LEONARDO journal, and 2 nervous presenters.

The conference was excellent, and we were very much back in our comfort zone. (Alex was flogging another project here also: a VR theatre experience called “Fatherland” and there was a lot of exciting VR technology around) Our paper seemed to be well received and it was great to feel part of the arts community there. The talk was well organised and we were made to feel very welcome. The conference stalls, exhibitions and presentations gave us loads to think about regarding game engine usage for animated feature development. It made us realise the real-time aspect of using a game engine in “Virtual production” would definitely allow us to use much more reactive and traditional filmmaking techniques, much more akin to being on-set, as well as helping to bring the production costs down. There was also a lot of AI and deep learning software on show; it was clear how fast the technology is progressing in animation and rendering tech. Hopefully the near future is going to bring a lot more speed and automation to a lot of tasks which are, at present, very expensive and very time consuming.

Rewrites & Table Reads

One of the main goals of pitching to a producer is to get them to read your script. (or get one of their script-readers to read your script) The script is the blueprint for a film, without it, traditionally, there is no film. We are in a weird position in our production, in that we have effectively completed our “principal photography” on our mocap stage. We also have a rough cut of all of this with music and some foley and effects. As it stands however this cut still requires a lot of imagination to make sense of, as some parts are storyboarded better than others and some parts give limited context to the action, as they’re edited from raw, fixed, reference camera footage from the shoot.  As a film, it only works in the context of having read the script. It was a tricky decision whether to use the drama cut or the script to pitch our project, as they both have their own merits, but in the end we went for the script, as certainly in the world of Cannes, this is the expected format.

The Pipe Catcher spins a tale to Stina & her friends at the Night Fair.. (Played by the amazing Martin Daniels; audio from our 2 hour “Drama Cut” )

Our first job was to rewrite the script to add in new sections. An old cliche in filmmaking is that you make a film 3 times: once when you write it, once when you direct it and once when you edit it. We had made all sorts of script changes during the shoot and again in editing the drama cut. The first task was to get all of these changes back into the screenplay, so it more closely represented our vision for the film.

The second job was a more difficult one. Our film, by its very nature is challenging. Its influences: films like “Mulholland Drive” , “Picnic at Hanging Rock”. “Don’t Look Now” , “The Company of Wolves” are not traditionally commercial products, or certainly not in today’s film market place, and they rely as much on visual atmosphere and symbolism as they do on the more traditional elements of dialogue, exposition and traditional narrative form. I shall use another blog post to go into our approaches regarding narrative and symbolism, but it was always a worry that we needed to find a willing producer to give us feedback on where our film sat in the gradient between commercial and art house

We want our film to work as a horror film, but also as much, much more.  I wanted to get some external views on our screenplay, as we needed a dry-run of what an average producer might think on a first read-through. As I discovered fairly quickly, nobody is going to read your screenplay as a favour. As with all things in the film industry, you need to pay for it. It wasn’t cheap, but I got a “Hollywood” read-though and paid the extra for written feedback.  The feedback made it very clear this film was never going to be a mainstream box office smash. The reader didn’t understand a lot of what we were doing and our task (as difficult as this was) was to try and sift through all of his feedback and decode what was, and what wasn’t relevant to what we want to do. (Feedback should always be approached with honest reflection, but also caution. It can totally destroy a project as well as save it if it’s just taken verbatim. To quote a screenwriting lecture I once attended: “Opinions are like arsehols, everyones got one”) What was very useful was that it highlighted a few issues of clarity in our ideas and made it clear certain areas need strengthening and others needed to be readjusted to help the balance between narrative hand-holding and audience heavy-lifting. This is always a challenge for “art house” work, as at one end you have Hollywood characters screaming the plot at you every time they open their mouths, and at the other end you can end up with a vague pretentious mess of arty stuff that’s incomprehensible to everyone except the director. Our job, as i see it, is to try and give the target audience enough ingredients to make their own soup, but with enough guidance from our recipe that they could come up with their own tasty concoctions, and maybe even some that would never have occurred to us. (In my opinion this is what David Lynch miraculously achieved in “Mulholland Drive”, although this film requires a number a watchings to fully savour. But that’s another debate) This approach also reflects some of the thematic elements we are trying to explore, such as fugue states, symbolism as a creative act of perception by the protagonist and other pretentious sounding but well intentioned ideas I shall dive into in a future blog. That’s enough with the bad food metaphors I think.

So, the result was I did a rewrite and inevitably the process of doing so led me into discovering new ideas and new ways of crafting the story and the characters experiences that I hadn’t originally planned.  It also took the screenplay from 65 pages to 110 pages (110 pages is the mean average of pages needed to get a film made, according to various sources. This assumes a minute a page, not an entirely reliable assumption for our film, as the original 65 page screenplay drama cut was 110 minutes long)

Table read of the new screenplay – Clockwise left to right: Paul, Becky, Freya, Fiona, Ken, Sheila, Evie, Adrian.

The result of this rewrite means we now need to shoot some additional mocap, as there are now additional scenes and some dialogue changes (although about 2/3 of the film remains unchanged) To this end I decided a table read would be useful, as hearing a screenplay acted out is an essential part of crafting a finished version. Words that sound great on the page don’t always work with the rhythm of a particular actor or actress, and there is no easier way to see if you’ve overwritten a scene, or have put a joke in that falls totally flat, than hearing it read out-loud in front of you.  We had just enough time to organise our original Stina actress: Becky Waldron and our original Mahdid actress: Evie Payne, to take part, before we left for Vancouver. (Thanks also to Freya Spencer, Adrian Samuels, Ken and Sheila Charisse for agreeing to read and delivering some fantastic performances!). Due to clashing events, we had to do the reading 2 hours after I got off the plane from Vancouver, so it was a slightly surreal jet-lagged experience for me, but it has proved extremely useful in giving us a sense of the film’s overall shape, as well as dialogue bits that need tweaking. Although we now have more work to complete, its very exciting to see the way the story and characters have been enriched by this process. Also, any excuse to spend time on the story and take a rest from fundraising is always fine with me.

3d Production Pipeline 

As i’ve written about in previous posts, the majority of our production, up until this point (and for all of “Uncle Griot”) was completed using Autodesk Softimage. As Autodesk decided to end Softimage, we have had to start the process of rebuilding our entire asset library of rigs and tools again in a new software package we hope will stay with us for a bit longer. The software is called Autodesk Maya. Our plan is to get our custom software tools and rigs up to the same level of usability we had in Softimage, and then begin the process of Previz with the students. To replicate many of the tools in Maya, we are having to learn the object oriented programming languages of Python and PyQt, as a way to implement features we had previously built in Softimage’s node based programming system called ICE.

Griot’s facial animation system being rebuilt in Maya using Python and PyQt.

Previz involves doing a rough 3d block out of every shot of the whole film, similar to an animated storyboard. This allows us to time-out and plan what is required in each shot in detail. This is essential for costing the film, as well auditing what skills are needed for the higher resolution work  (such as animation, modelling, texturing, fluid simulation, compositing etc). It’s also very useful as a guide for scoring the music, and starting work on the foley and dialogue mixes as well as the edit.  The previz will be informed by our drama cut, which we are also revising at the moment to reflect our latest script additions. We are also planning to start work on experimenting with the UNREAL game engine as our primary renderer and investigate some of the virtual production technology we saw at Siggraph that works in the UNREAL environment. This will begin once our base assets are completed within Maya. We will also be continuing to work with FACEWARE as our primary facial capture tool.

Film Festival Success

I’ve been tweeting and posting regularly on facebook about our assorted film festival selections and awards for “Uncle Griot”, but I thought I’d end this blog by collating them all into one place. I am planning to release the film online at the end of the month, as it’s final festival submissions are almost complete. We’ve had a good amount of success on the festival circuit (We even managed to get selected for the Oscar accredited “Holly Shorts” festival in the Chinese Theater in LA!) and had some really great communication from festivals around the world (particularly from the “Florida Animation Festival”. There’s an interview I did with them in the previous blog post)  It’s an expensive business, as each entry can cost up to $65,  so you have to pick your festivals wisely, but we are very happy with the international coverage we finally achieved. (Although it did far better in the USA and Europe than it did the UK for some reason!)

• Official Selection for the Oscar-Qualifying “14th HollyShorts Film Festival” at the Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, CA.  
  
• Award for 1st Place in 3d Animation at the “Florida Animation Festival”
• Award for Best Animation at the “Top Shorts Online Film Festival”
  
• Official Selection for the “Festival de Cine de Madrid”
  
• Official Selection for the “The International Animation Film Festival (IAFF) Golden Kuker- Sofia”
  
• Award for Best Editing at the “Top Shorts Online Film Festival”
  
• Official Selection for the “Toronto FEEDBACK Film Festival”
  
• Award for Best Score at the “Top Shorts Online Film Festival”
• Award of Excellence at the ”One Reeler Short Film Festival”
• Official Selection at the “Fantasy. SciFi, Film and Screenplay Festival” in Toronto.
• Official Selection at the “Philip K. Dick Film Festival” in LA / New York
• Award for Best Cinematography at the “Fantasy. SciFi, Film and Screenplay Festival” in Toronto.

Here’s a behind the scenes video of some of the processes we used to make “Uncle Griot”. It’s accompanied below by an interview I did with the “Florida Animation Festival” about some of our techniques, inspirations and the big challenges we faced in getting it made at all!

FAF: What do you think are the benefits of working in CGI animation? The drawbacks?

PC: I’ve found one of the biggest benefits of working in CGI is also one of its biggest drawbacks. It gives you an almost limitless potential for telling your story in any environment you can possibly imagine (or are yet to imagine) with any characters you want, human or otherwise.

The big danger here is that this lack of creative boundaries can actually hinder rather than help the creative process–particularly if you don’t have a producer constantly reminding you of cost and timescale. They have a way of making you focus on specific choices! We found this problem especially true with the outdoor natural environments. For conventional filmmaking, there’s a certain amount of design in the environment at the pre-production stage and much of that you can get from location scouting. But the key difference here is that the final cinematographic process is also very reactive to the pre-existing design (i.e. the natural world). The director can react on set to light and form by just moving around. It’s a reactive as well as a prescriptive process. The problem with CGI landscape design is that it’s entirely design driven by concept art. Even if you start from photos or paintings, you have to build the landscape in a way that works from multiple angles, so it’s very easy to lose that important ability that I believe is essential to good art: reacting to things beyond your control, to mistakes as well as external agents and limitations. I’ve seen it with professional feature directors (and myself). You can end up with a “kid-in-the-candy-store” effect where too much choice means you ended up piling too many things in, or getting distracted by some other cool idea you suddenly realise is possible. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons a lot of CGI can sometimes look flat, contrived and uninspired. It’s over-designed. Our issue was how do we make the environment in a way that we can react to it as if we are on set? We never answered this problem completely in my opinion, although I’m mostly very happy with our landscape; but we had to do a lot of very time-consuming set dressing and landscape design per shot to camera. (Matte painting can be a savior in these instances if you have only a small amount of parallax or a static camera.) For our next project, the feature film that the short was developed from, we are planning to use as much real life scan data as we can as a starting point and also plan our shots using a game engine such as UNREAL. We are hoping this will give us the ability to throw ourselves into a world where we can react to colour, light, and form as well as design it.

In many respects we are using CGI to mimic a real film process, as that fits our narrative style of magical realism. It also gives us a fairly unique approach to our shot design. We captured all the performances on set in a similar way to a stage play. We had limited space so we concentrated on getting the best, most honest performance we could with only minimal blocking for camera. Our plan was always to try and react to the performances in post and frame and edit shots accordingly. This gave us a lot of freedom to build edits based on beats coming directly from the performance, and also overcome the restrictions of the performance space. This is, as far as I know, an untested approach, as the editing of a shoot, is normally restricted by the camera coverage, or by each shot being blocked specifically for a single camera. We had complete freedom to put the cameras anywhere we wanted after the shoot. It allowed us to have more improvised, as well as heavily scripted scenes which really helped us get the most out of our child actors, as the physical blocking for camera was less of an issue. You can see this particularly in our “Uncle Griot” short, where the interaction between the four-legged Griot (played as a reference for the animators by me crawling around on set) and Stina was largely improvised. This process allowed us to then rebuild the performances with basic previz rigs and apply our “egg head” models: projected facial performances from the actors head cams. We could then review the scenes and try and frame and edit shots sympathetically to the performances and our narrative intentions. This freedom also had its drawbacks though, as you need to be very clear on the intent of every shot, as the infinite potential can be completely overwhelming!

From a technical point of view, the biggest hurdle with this kind of high realism CGI is faces (in our case we were not going for photo real, but idealised). Doing it well gives you the chance to really communicate some subtle and nuanced performance beats, but it also requires a lot of work. As someone who has a lot of experience in the realistic facial animation process, (having worked professionally animating “Gollum” on “Lord of the Rings” as well as other characters) I knew how challenging it was and built a very detailed and realistic facial animation system before we even planned the shoot. We used blend shapes and other rigging tools and based it on the Facial Acting Coding system of Dr. Paul Ekman (this forms the basis of most film industry facial animation systems) This is essentially a sculpting task and requires good observation skills and a lot of patience. The next stage was translating the performances from the actors’ faces onto the rig. This required the best quality locked-off video we could get. (we got this by making our own face cams from a weightlifters neck rig and some webcams, all very Heath Robinson, but it did the job!) The next challenge was copying this data onto the rigs. We used FACEWARE software to do the first pass. And then did a pass of hand keying to finesse it. There is as yet no quick way to automate this process completely and it’s our biggest concern for the full feature development we are currently planning. (Even the big studios have admitted it always comes back to hand keying at some point. There is, as yet, no real substitute for the animator’s eye!)

FAF: Watching your behind the scenes video, I was awestruck by the use of light in your film. Can you talk a little about this?

PC: The world of our film exists in a place between reality and dreams. The mountains Stina inhabits are above the cloud layer, with nothing but the sun, a thin atmosphere, and stars above her. We wanted a dreamlike quality to the light. As well as being very influenced by the dreamlike, light-soaked cinematography of Terrence Malick, a big reference for us was sunlight as seen in space. We particularly wanted to get the prismatic effect of light breaking into its component parts. We used the “light leak” trick, often seen in film these days to try and get this effect. Some of it was done in post using Nuke and reacted procedurally to the light in the rendered frames, whereas other times we used stock footage of light leaks through real camera lenses composited over the renders. In each case, we processed the effect to try and amplify the prismatic separation. I also noticed that when you split out the prismatic colours of white light, even subtly, it really seems to give the colours in your image a lot more vibrancy, and I think this helped with the dream-like effect.

Our feature has a specific colour design journey that develops with the story, and as this short was taken from our feature project, we also used that to hold with the lighting design. At this stage in the film we wanted to get a real feeling of space, sky, and sun and the sense of infinite possibility this can give, as this reflects Stina’s point in her story arc. We tried to keep the horizon clear in most shots, allowing as much blue light from our sky (projected by an HDRI dome light) and have this contrasting vibrantly with a lemon-tinted sun. This also allowed us to make the most of reflections from our environment cloud map, which we moved slightly for composition every shot.

As we wanted a “filmic” look we also tried to mimic the onset film lighting process. Our render engine: Arnold, allowed us to use 3D modeled bounce boards. We physically placed them in the scene to add fill light bounced up from the sun. We also deliberately used the real-life limitations of keeping them out of shot and having to move them along with the actors. We also added ”beauty” lighting with spot and rims to amplify the staging for the close-ups and get that characteristic eye-lit effect you see in glossy Hollywood films. We set these lights up after getting the environment lighting how we wanted it, so again this allowed us to mimic the process of real on set lighting.

One of the advances we are really hoping to make for our next stage in the feature production is recreating as much of this lighting process as possible in a game engine. We are hoping this will give us a much clearer sense of the final look at a previz stage, which means less (costly) revisions when we do the final lighting. It would be amazing to set up a reactive environment that we could experiment in and it would also help us make the process as organic as possible.

Our short film “Uncle Griot” has now been accepted to the Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner. We’re very excited at the opportunities this now gives us and Alex and I are off there in May to learn about how to secure finance and distribution for the whole feature. More news soon..