Our short film “The Aunts House” (or “scene05_AHS” as we’ve come to know it as part of our 2 hour feature) is finally complete, and we’ve now sent it out to film festivals around the world. (Fingers crossed!)
General online release will come once it’s finished the festival circuit. It now forms the centrepiece of our bid for an Epic Mega Grant which we’ve now submitted to Epic Games. (Fingers crossed again!) It’s been a very busy year for us here at Foam Digital, and we’ve had some great new talent join our Stina team along the way from the ranks of Portsmouth University’s Animation BA and BSC courses.
As we wait for the results of our film festival entries and our Mega Grant application we have started forging ahead with our full feature. We are now approaching it chronologically, scene-by scene (46 scenes in total). Up until this point we’ve been choosing scenes to focus on that work well as proof-of-concepts to test the viability of our pipeline, and to find the kind of technical and aesthetic quality we can achieve. We are really happy with what we got with the “Aunt’s House”, it really delivered the look we want for the film, and allowed us to communicate the emotion of our characters’ journeys very effectively, which really is central to the whole project.
Using Unreal Engine has helped us experiment with ways we could weave in the symbolism of our central theme and react to the performances with camera choices and framings. We were able to move around our characters and cherry pick moments in the drama we wanted to focus on; subtle looks and expressions as the characters interact. This has been possible due to being able see the final results of our choices playing out in real time. It has allowed us to play and experiment, and proved a much more fluid way of working than we’re used to (And occasionally offered almost too much choice!) It also allowed us to flesh out the rich world Stina lives in and develop ideas from the script and lore more fully onto the screen. We are now settled on using the Unreal Game Engine for the entire feature, and we’ll be using our new short as a guide to the standard we need to hit for each scene. (Which we’re hoping will get increasingly quicker and easier as the technology advances.)
The Drama Cut
Yesterday we had our first screening of the “drama-cut”: a full length cut of the feature, which we wanted to show to the crew so they had a deeper understanding of our story.
It’s a 2 hour cut of the film with key music and foley but requires a lot of imagination; it’s a mixture of studio footage from our motion capture shoot, storyboards, concept art, 2d animation and some limited CGI (such as “The Aunt’s House” and other animation test scenes we’ve done over the years).
As a director, it’s always nerve wracking showing off a piece of work for the first time, and in this case particularly so, as it’s very much a simple blocking-out of the overall film as a story, with very few of the bells and whistles of a finished film such as camera editing, cinematography and CGI. We booked the film screening room in the university for it, and popcorn in hand, we sat down for a 2 hour viewing.
“Gunter and Olaf creep out of the village to find the Pipecatcher’s Karavan”
“Griot is dumped in the animal shelter”
“A desperate Stina trys to save Gunter”
“A moment of calm with Griot in the forest”
“Stina follows a horrifying trail into the underworld”
“..The trail leads down into the dark depths”
“The Lair”
“The Underworld”
After the screening we went for a social down the pub and dived into everyone’s reaction to what they had seen. The response was really exciting. The emotion of the film seemed to have really made an impact. (In no small part thanks to the music scoring choices – especially the end section of Mahler’s second Symphony which accompanies the emotional end of Stina’s journey in the final act; almost impossible to sit through and not get a chill down your spine.)
What was particularly exciting was that the film provoked some real post-viewing reflection on the themes of the movie. Without ruining the film, it deals with some very emotive subjects that, channeled through our fantastic performers, seemed really to hit a nerve. It’s an epic and emotional journey that seemed to have had an impact even in its raw, unpolished state. In addition, the more ambiguous and symbolic elements of the story didn’t seem to alienate the experience, and for the most part seemed to support it well.
What was interesting from looking at these responses was gauging who would be the ideal market for this film. I genuinely didn’t expect it to have such an impact in its early form, and it made me wonder if the audience might be broader than I’d previously thought. It has some very dark and scary moments, so it’s definitely not a film for children, but films like “Pans Labyrinth” and “The Lovely Bones” came up as comparison movies, so I think as a young-adult film aimed at audiences that like an emotional, sometimes dark and scary journey, one that embraces the fantastical and the ambiguous and leaves you with as many questions as answers, it definitely has precedent and definitely has an audience!
What’s Next?
So where next for the project? Well, we are already hard at work on the opening scene, with multiple animations already underway by our talented team. (More on that soon!). But we still have the same issue we’ve always had: Time v money. There is no short-cut to producing the amount of animation minutes we need to produce in a reasonable amount of time (With the “The Aunts House” it took us 2 years to make 8 minutes of polished film. Our full-length feature cut currently runs to 118 minutes. That’s a 55 year production at our current rate!) If we get the Mega Grant ($150,000) that will give us a great start on our journey; we will be able to pay more animators to get the volume of work done more quickly.
“Stina and the Wolf” – the Mini Series
Projections we’ve made have guided us to approach the movie in a new way: By splitting the feature into 3 40 minute episodes at natural break-points in the drama, the production becomes much more feasible to fund and produce. Our current plan is to fund each of the 3 episodes separately, using the Mega Grant to help us get the first episode done in a reasonable amount of time. We would then use that episode to help us fund the remaining 2 episodes. If we don’t get the Mega Grant (it’s a very competitive grant!) We will at least have a solid plan and costing for what it’s going to take to finish the project, which will hopefully make fundraising easier for us in the future.
That’s all for now folks.
More news coming in the new year.
Happy Christmas from us all here at Foam Digital, and thanks for all your continued support. It means a lot to us!
Paul
