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.

I do certainly have a few interesting side-projects on the go – of which there will be more news as it comes. And two of the films I edited whilst at the NFTS are now on the IMDb, so I now have my own page there on which I am described as an editor… which feels good. Almost as if by being described as an editor on that site means that I really am a professional editor from an external point of view. And in such early stages of my career at a really difficult time in the industry, the validation is comforting.

In any case, I have updated my excerpt reel. I’m in the process of making a documentary reel to go alongside it, but this one is for drama and animation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As usual, any feedback is appreciated.

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

–

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.

–

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

… 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…

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.

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.

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.

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!

Wednesday is our ‘final’ board meeting, by which point the storyboard should be completely sorted. The editors have only actually had the last 5 days to be working full time with the animators – it’s been a moment here and there stolen from another project before now. So essentially that’s 7 days to get the animatic sorted and sort out the angles, plot holes, ordering, trimming of redundancies…. theoretically all possible. Except every time you request a new angle or additional drawing to fill in either information in the current angle or a new one, the animator has to go and draw that, as well as scan it!

Once all of the frames from the original storyboard had been scanned and put in order, we basically started working in a system where I played around with timings and made a wish list of extra shots/ points to raise while Hye-Bin (my director) was working on some new frames. We meet up when she’s done with that. We quickly insert the frames in to where they were meant to be, I go through my new list with her, we discuss some of the plot points and/or pacing issues that are emerging from the present version, then I go and trim the frames we’d just inserted and look through it some more whilst she goes and draws the solutions we think of during our chat. And repeat.

It’s a process not without difficulties. The main point at the moment is making sure that an audience understands what’s going on – especially since there’s going to be very little intelligible dialogue even when the film’s been finished. For this film we should initally be aiming for an animatic completely without sound, any points which motivate action (e.g. a doorbell) should be drawn on to the frame at the appropriate point or added in FCP. Looking over the current film this weekend I’m considering suggesting the removal of a scene which I think isn’t adding much to the film – however nice it is and how much we’ve worked on it, it’s sometimes a decision you have to make. And the ending’s something that neither of us are yet completely satisfied with – but we’re sort of hoping for inspiration to strike!

So here’s the new blog, which I can also update from school – which may be slightly dangerous. In any case, I’m currently officially half-way through my winter fiction edit (last fiction before the graduation films) – though only just past the first cut stage because of spending the first week waiting for the year above’s grad films to play out on the HDCAM deck I needed,  then sorting through the rushes once I’d digitised them. But it’s now resembling a film, however lumpy.

I’ve now teamed up for my graduation animation film. I’m working with Hye Bin Lee, who I’m really happy to be working with again after an excercise last year, and Michelle ‘BAFTA nominated‘ Eastwood. As some called her at the time. We’re getting our documentary pitches later this week, then fiction after our Easter break. Presumably once we’ve finished editing the current project and the directors have had time to properly think about their films.

Oh, and Walter Murch visited the school for a day. Weird guy, but great. Covered a lot of the stuff that’s in In the Blink of an Eye, but also had some very entertaining images and techniques. And my fellow editors at school no longer see me as hyper-organised, relatively speaking (though they still mock my colour scheming). But he’s very careful to stress that these things are what works for him - different people may find different styles. Just because he likes to wear the same jumper when sound-mixing, and take photos of the buildings where he’s edited (with his window circled) he’s not suggesting that we all do!

Except you should always stand up – he’s quite clear on that. Good old Walter.