Cherry on the Cake at the London Film Festival

Cherry and her creator, Hyebin Lee, will be at the “Animated Short Films + Meet The Directors!” event on the 16th of October, which is especially for 7-11 year olds to learn more about the techniques of animating short stories.

THEN there’s the “Amazing Stretchy Families Workshop” at the BFI Learning Space on the South Bank on the 28th. According to the BFI site, “Inspired by the film, families will design and animate their own characters whose bodies change depending on their feelings.”

…. and of course, you can just go and see the film amongst other fab international animations as part of the “Animation Panorama” from the 23rd to the 25th in NFT2.

‘Cherry On The Cake‘, the NFTS graduation animation I edited is playing at the 12th Shanghai International Film Festival in the International Student Shorts Award section this month (incidentally competing against another NFTS graduation animation from the year before which just won a Welsh BAFTA), and ‘The Love Bureau’, the NFTS graduation documentary, is at Archipelago in Rome next week.

Other graduation films which I wasn’t involved in are also doing really well – another animation called The Incredible Story of My Great Grandmother Olive was nominated for a Student Academy Award (Best Honorary Foreign Film), and one of the fictions went to Cannes (Cinéfondation) – see producer Michelle Eastwood’s account at FilmLondon.org.uk.

There are also three animations, a documentary and a fiction screening at Edinburgh this year, with 5 graduates who worked on them named amongst Skillset’s Trailblazers for 2009.

It all seems as if it’s finally starting, that our yeargroup which officially finished in December is starting to make an impact and become known. People are passing on work to each other through word of mouth and being asked to recommend people from other disciplines for future work, we’re getting involved in small collaborative projects with each other… exciting times indeed.

From the TV graduation project, ‘TV or Not TV?‘, some clips have been uploaded to YouTube by the producer/director, Guy Press. Please rate and/or comment them!

TV or Not TV? YouTube Channel

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And the animation  which I edited, ‘Cherry on the Cake‘, has had its DVD packaging finalised and it looks glorious. It’s now ready to be sent off to festivals.

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Please follow the embedded links above for further information about the projects and how to contact the producers for any enquiries you may have.

I find it interesting that the Cinematographers and Composers seem to be most on the ball with this, whilst some courses (directing fiction, screenwriting, production management diploma) don’t seem to be represented at all… and because of course changes we had no digital post production or sfx/vfx diploma graduates in our ‘class’, but the courses are alive and well.

So here we are, for your investigative/ hiring purposes:

Animation:

Toby Jackman

Helen Piercy

Alberto Rodriguez

Cinematography:

Leigh Alner*

Sam Care

Sara Deane

Brian Fawcett

Dan Stafford-Clark*

Vanessa Whyte*

Felix Wiedemann

Composing for Film and Television:

Stuart Earl

Jon Opstad

Roger Goula

Documentary Direction:

Ida Grøn

Estephan Wagner

Editing:

Judith Allen (me!)

Hazel Baillie

Lawrence Huck*

Mikael Svartdahl (Norweigan language only)

Producing:

Michelle Eastwood

Producing & Directing Television Entertainment:

Philip Connolly*

Joana Flor*

Sophia Garrido

Production Design:

Max Berman

James Morrall

Sound Post Production:

Zhe Wu

Sound Recording Diploma:

James Broome

Michael Lee Taylor

* = site not yet live/ placeholder

I can’t really say anything specific, mostly because I just don’t know. They’ll be looking for different things each year, depending on the general skill level and interests of the applicants (there’s no point in having a class of 8 people who are all at completely different levels of experience, technical knowledge etc). I have a fairly limited knowledge of the procedures outside the post-production section, and the knowledge I do have is three years old. Some of the things I’ll say may be more relevant to some courses than others, and the knowledge I have related to the applications procedure comes from having been at the school for two years and talking to the other students rather than being involved in or enquiring in-depth about the selections.

However, I’ll pass on some notes expanding on the points I try to mention to everyone else who asks me, so that I can direct people to this page in the future. This is more of a guide to things you may want to think about before you start your application than what to actually write – above all, be yourself. Don’t assume that what I’d write is in some way more likely to get you a place than what you’d write. Not only do things change, but you’re the one who’s going to be going through the stages of the applications – and potentially up to two years at the place.

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1. Do your research

The school’s website is at http://www.nfts.org.uk . From there you can view course information, an online copy of the prospectus, information about the school’s history and alumni (famous and recent), details of the application procedures for each course…. just about everything you need.

By having found this page, this probably isn’t something that I need to be saying to the people who are reading it – but the number of job interviews I’ve been to when I’ve casually mentioned something I’ve seen on the company’’s website that interested me and the astonishment it has sometimes caused…. I’ve learnt to not just assume that it’s taken for granted that I’ve taken even 10 minutes out of my Facebook/ Twitter/ sleeping time to read up on a company or specific role before an interview.

This isn’t just a tip for the applications process – it’s to make sure that you know that you want to go. The majority of courses last two years. That’s two years in which you’re not earning money (and have to pay fees), two years in which you’re handing your life over to the projects you’re doing at the school on some very intensive courses, and for some students at the school who I knew, two years in which you may not be able to even visit your home country or see your family (international students are a huge part of the NFTS, don’t let the ‘National’ in the name put you off!). This the structure of a typical UK undergraduate arts degree where there are two hours of lectures and then a lot of time in a bar – this is a 5/6/7 days a week 8-20 hours a day undertaking at the really busy periods for some courses.

2. Why do you want to do the course you’re applying for?

Why do you want to do cinematography/ directing/ producing/ sound design etc. rather than anything else? How did you find it? Where would you like to end up in your career? What would you do if you didn’t get into the school? What steps have you taken towards your goals so far? How is the NFTS course suitable for your specific needs? Do you have any concerns or questions about the contents of the course and how suitable it is for you?

3. Why do you want to go to the NFTS?

The research you’ve done into the school will help here. Consider which other options were open to you – other film schools, employment, even waiting a bit longer and applying another year. Have you considered the implications of the time/ financial/ personal/ residential commitment?

Again – this is something you should be able to answer for yourself, and as a secondary consideration as part of an application process. Film School isn’t the be-all and end-all of working in film or television. There’s no obligation to go. A lot of the courses run week-long selection workshops during which it’s stressed that it’s as much for you to find out about the school as it is for the school to find out about you. This is a graduate degree programme, and a degree of maturity is expected. If you see the course solely as a means to an end then you’re going to have a very rough two years, and you definitely won’t get the best that you can from the experience.

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…. and that’s all I can really think of to say. You can read the rest of my blog for some of my further experiences at the school (specifically the most recent ones for the overviews). I’ve met some great people there, and had some good times. Is it for you? That’s not something I’d want to comment on for anyone. But hopefully I’ve given you something to think about before you make your application.

Good luck!

… at least that’s what the certificate says. If you remove certain words.

My time at the NFTS culminated in 3 days of graduation screenings at the British Film Institute on the South Bank in London. Wednesday and Thursday were industry days – where various members of the film and television industry were invited to see the graduation films and some other selected films from the two year course, and then we could discuss them over drinks afterwards.

Of course, this also means that we got to see each other’s films for the first times in many cases – when the films were shorter in the first year with more regular deadlines, we used to all attend reviews and screenings to give feedback and see what everyone else was doing with their brief. But in the second year we all got a bit too busy and had our own films to be concentrating on, and the tradition lapsed – but it was great to see how they’d all turned out after hearing varying amounts during the filming and editing processes.

In addition to the four graduation films, I had two other films which I’d edited in my first year (a fiction – Brixton 85, and a documentary – Davey’s Last Order) screened at the industry days, which gave me a new audience reaction to notice and a chance to evaluate the editing decisions I’d made over a year ago… which was both illuminating and painful in certain respects, as self-examination tends to be!

The graduation films themselves all went extremely well – the animation Cherry on the Cake had laughs and ‘aww’s in all the right places and looked fantastic on a huge screen. The Love Bureau went down extremely well with the right humour – and perhaps in retrospect an overabundance of cats… although it was fairly representative of the rushes! Park Close again went down very well in front of a new audience, although I was double-booked with the screening of  TV or not TV which was unfortunate as the cast and writers were also in attendance and I thought it would be more useful to get the fresh audience reaction there.

Friday was the friends and family day and the actual graduation itself – which may have been more nerve-racking in many respects! Although in true NFTS tradition it was all rather informal… we corrected Nik’s (the director of the school) speech en masse, got called scruffy by Michael Kuhn, had official photos taken with the stage party, and given sparkly certificates.

So on with the search for further employment! Whilst waiting for the less official ‘wrap’ party…

This was probably the last big screening or session that I’ll have attended during my time at the NFTS. But over the last two years, there have been quite a few people who’ve come to the school to share their personal wisdom and experience – and I do view myself as very fortunate to have had the opportunity to encounter so many fantastic people from the global film industry. I’ll try to list the ones who really stick out in my mind here – although most assuredly I’ll forget someone major.
Brian Tufano. It’s easy for me to forget about Brian, since he’s around the cinematography department so much. Idolized by the cinematography students, and justifiably so from the work experience, tutoring and inspiration he gives them.

Walter Murch. Came into school for one day only, complete with handouts and powerpoint presentations to illustrate case studies – in which we saw the view of his edit suite inside and out and his favourite mixing jumper (amongst other things). Just as insistent on the “you should stand up to edit” principle as you’d expect, and gave a really useful insight into sound at the same time illustrated by some truly classic sequences from the films he’s edited.

David Yates. Was deep in the Order of the Phoenix post at the time, but was very happy to talk at length about his previous projects and the importance of TV work. State of Play is an obvious example of this – it’s a fantastic drama, which everyone should see before the Kevin Macdonald film version comes out. He’s an alumnus of the NFTS’s directing course. Absolutely wonderful man, lovely to be around and totally unassuming.  Post-production trivia point – he insisted on taking his usual editor and composer with him if he was going to agree to direct Harry Potter. WB agreed.

Roger Deakins. Another fantastic bloke, another NFTS alumnus. Not suggesting any correlation, but you know….. He had all the time in the world for any questions from anyone, spent another day exclusively with the cinematography students (who temporarily found a new idol). He remembers details and answers questions on every shoot he’s ever done, talked through scenes from Jarhead, Jesse James… and was just incredibly giving with his time and thought processes. The forum on his website deakinsonline.com gives some insight into the type of answer a typical cinematography question would get.

Darren Aronofsky. Came in the day before we could see The Wrestler in our weekly preview screenings, which he seemed genuinely disapponted about and requested that feedback be sent on to him once we’d seen it. Which was actually pretty mindblowing for a generation of film school students who almost universally hold Requiem for a Dream to the highest possible regard. He opened the session with the fact that he’d applied to the NFTS but hadn’t gotten in – quite the ice breaker! Happy to talk on all subjects even those which seemed slightly uncomfortable – such as recasting and associated budget cuts.
Other inspirational names from my time at the film school – whether it was a short tutorial or full exercise/ short film editing supervision:

Stephen Frears – tutored throughout the first year film project alongside Sean Barton during the editing stage.
Alex Mackie – first year external examiner and tutor on our Richard III exercise. Very open, and has been a great help to me.
Barry Vince – came in very early in our film school careers to provide a structured and solid background in editing processes from which to work.
Roger Crittenden –  quite literally wrote the book on editing (or a book, at any rate), and tutored on several fiction films in my second year.
Mamoun Hassan – we spent a day with Mamoun just analysing the opening few minutes of The Man in the White Suit and learnt more about filmmaking than we ever thought possible.

I suppose one of the benefits of a postgraduate degree is being able to appreciate things like this all the more fully – and whilst you still have access to them. But the next stage is to get out there and start making names for ourselves in some form. Onwards and upwards, as they say….

So here’s my new showreel, updated from the previous to include my graduation films from the NFTS and some of the animations I’ve worked on at the school:

Editing Showreel Jan 2009 from Judith Allen on Vimeo.

… and here are two of my favourite sketches from my most recent editing project, ‘TV or Not TV’:

TV or not TV – ‘Corporate Woman’ from Judith Allen on Vimeo.

TV or not TV – ‘The Facts of Life’ from Judith Allen on Vimeo.

As we were running late, I had to go to pick up one of the actors from reception whilst another was finishing up in the recording booth. I saw him, went over, said his name…. and then realised that there was absolutely no reason in the world why he’d know who I was. I may have been editing material with him in it for the past month, but he’s never seen me before in his life.

I’d read about this aspect of editing before in books, but had always assumed it to be along the lines of seeing a well-known TV or film personality walking down the street. We may watch them weekly on television, but we never think that we know them.

Except from a certain aspect, we do know the people who we’ve edited. We’ve actively studied their physical and facial reactions on several different takes in an attempt to judge one the ‘best’ or ‘most apt’ for the surrounding scene and performances. We’ve berated them (sometimes loudly in the direction of the computer monitor without acknowledgement of the futility of such an action) for an utter lack of consideration to continuity between different slates. We’ve interpreted their intentions and characterisations – and when hard decisions have been made on the subjects we’ve made them with the actor because of what they’ve given us to work with. We’ve made cuts and decisions alongside their performance - to enhance one character trait whilst diminishing another, to engage the audience as if they were there in the room when the scene was being filmed (or even within the mindset and context of the drama they’re watching, as appropriate).

It just seems a little harsh at times, when part of the job description involves getting involved to some extent in the emotional journey of the characters that you’ve been watching on screen for weeks or even months. The lack of acknowledgement can sometimes feel total. They’ll likely never know just how much we study them and feel that we know them and/or their character. But it’s probably for the best. A self-conscious actor is usually the last thing you want when they’re doing their close-ups, and so long as the finished product looks great then everyone’s done their job well.

The past month or so has been devoted to the Fiction graduation film. It’s been a bit of a journey, and our final structure is borne of the knowledge that we’ve tried just about all reasonable alternatives in-keeping with the genre. We’re at the stage now where if someone suggests something different to the version they’re seeing, I can just grab it from another sequence and demonstrate why it was rejected.

However, the fact that we’ve arrived at something which bears a strong resemblence to the first cut (barring two scenes swapped and others shortened or deleted) may have been a product of not trimming the scenes down at an earlier stage, to work with their position at the time – which would have made it easier to isolate the reasons why certain themes weren’t working so well rather than leading us around a mad semi-fantasy world in which half of the virgin audience thought that our main character was mad (we’re aiming for rom-com)! Not that that didn’t have its value of course – we determined the precise value of the dream section and returned it to its original form, cutting out all recurrences or flashbacks – even those originally scripted.

But whilst I thought I was going in and trimming as much as I could whilst we were still moving scenes around – thereby saving time because of not having to massively adjust scenes when we’d changed the order of events, I can see now just how much it held us back. In one sense.

In the other sense, we’re still on track to picture lock on the original schedule – and we almost certainly wouldn’t have arrived at the same film with the same confidence had we not gone through the stages that we did.

A still from “Mr Perfect”

This is one of the later stages, complete with temporary subtitles. The main video (and associated audio) is mostly coloured by character or location, which helped to give a decent at-a-glance indication of how the overall structure was looking without having to go through scene by scene every time we moved something.

Doc edit in AXP

Meanwhile, the animation’s been moving… well, as quickly as these things do, I guess. Most of the significant line drawing’s almost complete (there are assistants to do intermediate steps, as well as colouring once a few frames have been done), and we’ve altered the timing of a few shots now where it seemed right in the animatic, but had to change slightly once motion was added. There’s more still to come, but it makes the most sense to just spend half an hour each day with the director and run through any queries and recent work – less frequently if there’s a lot of other stuff going on, but she’s the fastest WACOM user in the West! Since she’s working with stills for the filmed backgrounds, the best bet’s probably going to be to reimport the final film with the new timings, alter the HDCAM backgrounds to sync with the film, then re-export for the compositing stages.

A still from the NFTS short animation 'Cherry On The Cake'

I’ve also been learning a bit of DVD Studio Pro in my downtime, with a view to producing a proper showreel DVD with complete films within each type of thing that I’ve cut (documentary, animation, fiction, adverts, promos etc). I’d done some really basic stuff with it in the past, and I’m still going the long way around on some things I’m sure, but anything which allows this amount of control is worth it:

Preliminary thoughts on editing showreel layout in DVD Studio Pro

… yes, that IS a picture from Cherry in the background. It’s intentionally blurred, and makes an appearance in the film in a photo frame - the level of detail on that model was fantastic.

Time to clear some of the 50+ hours of documentary rushes from my hard drives to make way for the fiction. After that is a sketch show (post planned for October/November), then it’s just supervising post on the films I’ve done and out into the ‘real’ world. Easy.

http://reel-exchange.com/members/cc8e25f7/profile/

I intend to do another one in a few months’ time once all of the grad projects are over, since they should technically be my showcase pieces… but I find it useful to at least know that I’ve got something up before the great (and quite probably eternal) job search begins. There’s just no way of knowing what time I’ll have free between now and then – though my documentary edit has at least now resumed after reshoots. Which means yet more digitising… in many ways I can’t wait for everything to go tapeless, but if it could hold off for just a bit longer whilst I’m not relying on digitising jobs to eat, that’d be fantastic…. Though my recent frustrations with exporting and uploading to network (for backup) a 22,000+ HDCAM resolution TARGA sequence suggest that there’ll still be jobs around for a while yet. Also that my WD 1TB firewire drive was indeed a good investment. It’s turned out to be a vital piece of kit in the last few weeks.

Production designer James makes some last minute adjustments

The second stage of editing on my NFTS graduation animation, in which the live action background rushes are assembled according to our original animatic, has been completed. The backgrounds from the first shoot were done a few weeks ago, and given to the animator as a low-res .mov so that she could start work on the line drawings and getting the early stages of the animation started. This finished sequence will now replace that half-finished version in the first layer of her after-effects timeline.

Handles have also been added to a duplicate sequence to be graded (to allow colouring and compositing to start) so that they’re available for any extensions to the head or tail of a shot, should they turn out to be necessary – even though we timed everything as near as possible during the animatic phase. The film was shot with this in mind, so overall the sequence with the handles that will be graded is almost twice as long as the animatic and final film, though it’s the same number of shots so it shouldn’t be a major additional burden on the grading – and notes will be made on the EDL on which frames (multiple of 10 for easy trimming purposes) at the start and end of a shot are the handle.

We’ll be exporting a full res (1920 x 1080) TARGA sequence from the online suite because the school edit suites only have Sony HVR-M15Es and we’re not linked to any of the higher-res decks, and once I’ve removed the handles I’ll be giving my animator a TARGA sequence (plus any additional frames as necessary)… so it seems to make sense. To us, and that’s possibly what counts the most. It’s all about the trial and error really – the way we’re going about it may not be the most efficient, but given the resources we have plus the need for the animator and editor to have immediate access to the graded handles once the grader’s left the job (he’s a former student of the school – grading a grad project at this point in the year is a tricky proposition) it’s what we’ve come up with.

I thought I’d share what my workflow so far’s been, and the vague outline of how we’ve gotten from 25 hours of rushes in which I understood very little of the speech to a stage where I feel confident of being able to do some proper editing work whilst there are still some sections of the documentary being filmed.

1. Outline translation from tape of main themes and topics in interview, with loose timecode and tape number. This was done by the director whilst I was still digitising and logging the interview segments as massive chunks with logical breaks, and splitting up the GVs by location.
2. Clip selection from our main interview, in this case the woman who runs the marriage agency that the film’s based around. This went more rapidly than it would have without the outline translation, as some parts were clear repeats in a less useful context – and we’ll still have that outline further down the road. Lots of pausing and asking what came before/after the bit which we’d already selected – but trusting that the director understands the criteria for selection was the biggest factor.
3. Detailed translation of the selects. About two hours’ worth of interview material from our main interviewee, and half an hour or so from the Ukranian section. BITC relating to rushes TC rather than sequence TC because of how it relates to the way the material had been captured and logged.
4. Familiarisation with material. Reading, marking with highlighter pens, taking notes with associated tape/timecode. Anything interesting, anything informative, anything potentially relating to something which will relate to the additional material yet to be shot.
5. Writing down main ’stories’ and themes from the transcript, with knowledge of the available material. We went in quite close on this part, since many segments of interview relate to multiple themes at once – although we had an idea of what would probably go together.
6. Arranging the stories to give an overall film structure. Whilst we’re aware that a lot of material is yet to be shot, it’s useful to have an idea of the shape of the film before going out and shooting – and invaluable to know that both editor and director are heading in the same direction in each others’ absence.

A long room can be useful. Failing that, a corridor. I like to take my directors out of the edit suite in the early stages where possible, so that it’s less of me being the one operating and doing stuff relating to their film.

The cards next to each other are in no particular order because of the thematic overlaps, it’s where they are in relation to what’s above or below them that we’ve worked on most. The cards all relate to certain timecodes and tapes – some have more than one instance of the same story or content, so both timecode/tape references are there. That’s now on my wall, with additional sticky notes… it’ll be interesting to see how it gets rearranged over the course of the edit, especially once the new material comes in. But for now I’m set… and expecting a few unintentionally humourous cut points when I go over an out point, but great things have been discovered that way before now…

This week, for example. It’s the first week of the 5 week (scheduled) documentary graduation film. The animation grad film that I’ve been working on the storyboard/ animatic for has started shooting the live backgrounds with another shoot scheduled for next month, and there are treatments for the fiction (shooting July/August) flying around. To top it all off, in a certain amount of style admittedly, this week we’ve had Roger Deakins and Mike Leigh come in to the school to show us some of their work and answer questions on their work and techniques. I may be an editor rather than a cinematographer or director, but both of them were so inspiring and with enough to say about how they collaborated with the other departments that both sessions were truly unmissable.

So my intended post on my efforts and attempted/ intended workflow on working in a foreign language or two which I don’t speak will have to wait a while. But it’s an experience I knew I’d appreciate. And I’m picking up a bit of the language as I go too!