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

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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.

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.