So unfortunately I wasn't able to raise enough money for some short movies for the "Manly Show" but I've been kicking around some ideas an old one and a new one.
This is a character test for the new idea
A character test for a new drama animation that I'm gearing up to do. Hopefully I can finish it in less than 5 years unlike my other film Porcelain.
It will also have less psychic powers and tentacles and instead have emotions and feelings.
I'm liking using the extra lines for expressions but not 100% happy with my line work (which was always going to be rough)
and here's the step by step making of
Hopefully I can finish it in less than 5 years unlike my other film Porcelain.
It will also have less psychic powers and tentacles and instead have emotions and feelings.
I'm liking using the extra lines for expressions but not 100% happy with my line work (which was always going to be rough). I might experiment with no outlines (although I feel that's a little played out now) or textured lines and either pushing a more stylised face or trying a few more realistic faces.
I really want to capture a 30+ older and more ordinary look as I want to tell a story about people in this age group. Drawing on my own experiences and friends.
It's still early days to be talking about the story I'm just trying to get a few of the characters together and then let them affect some of the scripts choices.
Well I'll talk about this and the other idea more when there's stuff to show.
As for the fate of the "Manly Show" well we won't be making the films but the
Well I made a new film and it should be screening tonight as part of Animators Hour on the Northbridge Piazza Super Screen. I'll also be putting the film on my Youtube channel tomorrow morning.
It's a very short film as it was only meant to be 30seconds and it had to use the music provided but I crammed it with as much stuff as possible... maybe too much.
Anyway here are some stills
It felt like a return to the original sort of short films I used to make before I started earning money working on other peoples shows and other commercial jobs. Those were some fun times but not really something I can afford to do as much as I could when I was younger.
Technical stuff, the backgrounds were done in photoshop, the animation was done in toonboom and grading added in after effects. I tried to approach this with as little animation as possible and more focusing on the illustrations carrying the film. I tried to have a lot of foreground, midground, midback, farback, layout set ups as well as a slight camera hand held drift. Tell me if it works tomorrow
The Animators hour is here (see below) and it starts at 8:30pm - 9:30pm
I've heard there might even be something new from Roseline in it :)
I haven't really animated something of my own for ages. I've done some scribbly things using my iPad but nothing planned and executed. This short is part of an ongoing series that I want to do throughout this year but it is also part of my convoluted test film for a test film for a film.
Apart from the points listed, it is also to learn the software Toonboom. To understand how far I can push it, getting used to drawing and working fast in it and how to mix it with other programs. Also a big non software/technique point is to become a better filmmaker.
Oh one thing that I did before this film was to try and improve my drawing confidence. Surprisingly working in commercial animation I've found my drawing skills had dulled. I think that comes down to mostly working on symbol pushing flash shows where at most I'll draw a hand or an arm or adjust the eyebrows. Also staying on (very strict) model means I do the bare minimum most of the time and that doesn't push artistic growth. So to boost my skillzzz I invested my hard earned $1 into a scribble pad. I've tried to draw a little picture each day using no planning and work straight onto the pad with a felt pen. I really feel that this worked fantastically and I encourage everyone else if they want to improve their drawing skills the $1 investment is a good one. You can see my close to 100 drawings on my twitpic
Ok back to the above short. It has some obvious weaknesses (number 1 is it should be funnier) but I never regret a film or drawing that I've made. I figure at the time I made it that was the best that I could do. I learn from it and try to not make the same mistakes on the next ones. It was easier to learn from my earlier films as they would screen in festivals and you could sit amongst the crowd and listen to when you have them and when you lose them. Online films are harder to judge as a facebook like button doesn't tell you what was liked. From what little I could tell, things that worked were the scream, the expressions and the look. So that's something to build on for the next short.
Now I'm going to write a few things about working and using Toonboom Animate pro so that might be a bit boring to non animators or 'never going to use toonboom' animators (you were warned).
Drawing
Ok compared to flash, it's a dream to draw in. You can set the brush tapering (0.5 and 6 or 8) and the smoothing (I set this very low so low it doesnt really do anything) to pretty much emulate your natural drawing style and you can draw a hell of a lot of lines. So yeah, it's fun to draw and your lines don't look amateur when you use the brush tool.
At the start spend a lot of time setting and labeling your colours, probably the only chore. That said, once it is set it is quite powerful. It becomes really easy to tweek or even change the colours across the whole animation. My workflow with this is to do all the colours in photoshop then to eye drop and manually transfer the details into toonboom. I don't know if that is the best way though.
It also has one of my most favourite features the rotate canvas (you hold ctrl+ Alt, you can push shift x to reset the view). It's so hard to go back to not having this feature.
Every single line you draw is an object that you can click on and delete. this makes editing you lines really easy. It's good to flatten the lines once you're happy with it though as it saves memory.
When you draw you draw without anti-aliasing so it looks a bit rough. This probably allows the large amount of drawings. Also you also have to each drawing 4 layers to use. An ovelay layer (good for highlights) your line art layer, your colour art (I dont use this layer as it puts a weird lines around the colours... I should probably find the option to turn that off) and an underlay layer (where I do my colouring).
With the animation I just do the line animation first and once that is cool I do the colours. You can see with my lines I was able to add in some line details like shading hints. Something I can't do that in flash. Like at the moment I'm trying to do a loop animation in the same sort of style and I get that draw one line everything disappears thing and those little lines just morph into a blob ON MY SECOND FRAME!!!
I do my colouring under the line art in the underlay layer which is great because it means my lines dont have to be closed and can be quite rough. Also when you erase you don't affect the other layers (unless you turn that option on). When I was colouring I worked out that if I started with the little overlay things like highlights and shadows then (with the brush set to paint under) do the block colours. I think this is how old cels were painted. With this style I was able to add a white highlight as well as a shadow. I think it's a nice touch, better than using just gradients for shading.
It has some cool things with the shortcuts as well. Like to change to a tool you have to hold alt (ie alt + b switches to the brush) but if you just hold down the shortcut you can use it for a brief time till you let go of the short cut key (ie hold down 'i' for the eyedropper or' k' for the paint bucket for quick use while drawing). It also has some great options for selecting and fill bucket by drawing a lasso line over the areas you want to select or paint. That makes more sense when you use it, but dang it speeds things up. Oh and I had to dissable the 'z' shortcut key as that was doing timeline things (that I didnt want) as well as being the zoom shortcut (weirrrrd).
Each of your main layers (ie paleguy) is like a flash symbol and every new drawing is saved into it. You can cycle using '[' and ']' to go back and forward between the drawings. I didnt really use this much but it's pretty handy when doing lipsyncing.
Background and depth
My background (as I said in an earlier post) was done in photoshop.
Now if you want to do this and keep your layers (especially for doing camera move parallax stuff) each layer needs to be put into it's own folder. Those folders when they come into toonboom, become their own drawing layers. A cool thing is that all the layers in a folder when brought into toonboom become frames on the timeline. So if you wanted to add in an animated element, or a bunch of hands or mouths that's how you do it.
So yeah, a cool thing is the addition of z space. 'Depth'
Now once in toonboom you can bring up a side view and after pressing Alt-6 move each layer back to approximately the distance it would be from the main action without changing the scaling. A nice touch is it has a visual representation of each layer at the top that you can click on to select making it easier to chose the right layer.
Oh a cool thing was that I created a focus module and attached to the main action and depending on how far (on the z axis) the other layers were from the main action would affect how much they were in focus (blurred). Its a cute trick that could lend its self to some concepts.
You can also micro nudge layers back and forth on the z axis by clicking the layer and pressing Alt + Up arrow = go back in space Alt + down arrow = go closer to camera. This is great and fast for character interaction with props and other characters.
Exporting and After Effects
I've had problems exporting video out of toonboom like it crashes at 90% or something hair pulling like that. Doing frame sequences however are pretty good though. Since I was going to take this into after effects and I wanted some control over where the effects would be I wanted to export layers with alphas. Apparently any format with a 4 at the end means it has an alpha (4 meaning the amount of channels). The tga4 file didnt work but the old faithful png4 did. I really like png files, they are clean and they render fast in after effects. When I export out of After effects to go to premier I use Tga files as it seams to be the only stable file premier can handle
So this is a nice visual representation on what I did in after effects. I made it a lot warmer, changed the tree leaves. I had to create a specific mask to keep the glass looking like a glass and not lose that blueness. The grade was mostly about balance and tone. There was a version where there was a heat ripple on the scene. It looked great but didn't really suit the feel I was going for. I also moved the output view between my computer monitor and my cintiq to try and make sure it looked good on both screens (I should really properly calibrate these screens).
Bits and bobs
I did the sound mix in Audition and I used a lot of sounds that were recorded from my film 'Existence'. With the sound, it had to have a unique feel and it was great that my sound designer (Adrian Tolman) recorded all kinds of things for 'Existence' that I had a whole bunch of things to choose from. Real recorded sounds are 100 times better than sound cds and stuff you pull off the web. Oh I had a horror theme going when I first started the soundmix, but that was craaaazy. I did the voice acting because I was too lazy to get anyone else to do it. That scream was based on Raiden from Mortal Kombats flying headbutt yell (the most ridiculous yell in videogames haha)
I'm trying to get better at adding in effects into my animation, things like flares, speed lines and in this some water. My effects stuff moves a bit too quick so I need to add in more frames and think about exactly what is happening and do a simple pass first and then do a detail pass. I'd love to be a lot more stylised with my effects like this guy though.
I wrote in my notes 'varied frame rate'. If you're wondering it means working with different frame rates rather than doing everything on 1s or 2s. I think you can get away with this as long as the drawings are funny/over the top and sometimes it can add bit more weight to the movement. When working on some of these tv series I would find myself laughing at my blocking but not laughing at the finished animation. The extra frames were softening the impacts. I know a lot of my animators friends have a strongly different view to me on this and love their disney sleek but if I'm animating these films for myself I'm not going to kill myself drawing hundreds of frames to not find it funny anymore. Eff that haha
I took a lot of inspiration from the character styles, poses, expressions and animation style from the Lupin tv series that I've been watching. Those guys behind that are crazy and it's going to take a lot of hard work to get to their level.
Well that's the overall film breakdown. I'm going to try and get the storyboard done for the next film done soon but this month there's a whole bunch of work happening, which is good since I like to have money coming into my account sometimes.
This is the result of the 48hr animation competition WAMBAM, a little film called 'Real Vampire'. I'll write a little about it sometime this week as I'm still recovering.
the 48 hour animation comp has begun. I've got a pretty awesome team made up of people I'm working with on dogstar series 2. I'll update as we progress, for now here's some character designs
This is a short film was produced way back in 2004.
The film was conceived by Greg James who I later worked with on the Space Monkey film. The character designs and all the character animation was done by Roseline Lau.
Rose often revisits these jelly bean characters, last year she did a comic about them.
I was responsible for the art direction, picking colours and what not. I digitally painted all those clouds, and animated the million jelly babies you see for half a second when the jelly floats away. I also remember doing all the compositing despite what the end credits say and I have no idea why I'm credited for the sound since I took no part in that. So I guess just enjoy the end animation because those credits are a bit off.
Rose and I have always wanted to revisit this short. The changes we'd make is making the birds small little birds (snow white sort of ones), changing the red 3d things to real cushions and of course smoothing out some of that animation.
This old film was made by myself and my very old friend Robert Lee.
I was doing my 3 year Film and Tv course at TAFE and my animation lecturer was really cool and let us borrow the Umatic machine over the weekend so we could produce this film.
I used an all wire armature for the main character but we had the problems on working on the first shot of the wire snapping in the arm. So being the geniuses we were, we replaced his arm with a tentacle arm. The smoke was done by drawing chalk onto a vinyl blue folder (you can see the edges of the folder on one shot). We had heaps of fun putting as many sound effects as possible and often just throwing in crazy ones to make it funnier. I'd love to do another animation and treat the sound in this way. (Space Monkey I guess was pretty close) The song in the background was the films temp track that we never got around to replacing. It's Tom Waits 'Chocolate Jesus' from his 'Mule Variations' album (a great album you all should own)
We were big fans of the video game "The Neverhood" and it's all plasticine look. So this is our own version of that style. Actually thinking of that reminds me of a story. There was a follow up to this game called "Skull Monkeys". On the weekend we decided it be a great day to hire out this game since neither of us had played it. We were at Rob's place in Rockingham at the time and we checked out every video store around Rockingham and none of them had Skull Monkeys in store. Determined that we were going to play this game we drove over to my place in Gosnells (a 45minute+ drive since the freeway wasn't finished yet) and we started looking at all the major video stores in Gosnells but still no luck. We then furthered our search checking every video store from Gosnells to Cannington (about 20minutes from Gosnells) but nothing. At this stage we had practically given up and we were driving back home just as we were about to reach home I remembered just near my place (like 2 minute walking distance) there was a small privately owned video store. It was so small they wouldn't have something like that ....NO THEY DO! So something that begun at about 10am finished up at about 5pm, we could have been playing that game probably 3hrs earlier had we checked the store closest to my house but then it wouldn't had made it that rewarding of an adventure. heh
Well I'll finish up saying goodbye, safe trip and all the best to my pal Rob as he journey's to England for work as a writer for some tv production team. Of course if he tries to leave to country with my copies of "taste of tea" and "izo" he'll be leaving in a box! haha. Goodluck Rob!
Well I guess I should post up some new stuff. Posting just these old animations looks like I’m not doing anything productive just living in the past (man!).
First up Roseline and I have just finished (pending client approval) a mobile phone worker recruitment animation that is intended (I believe) for the web. The storyboards and character design were done by my ex-animation lecturer and fellow ‘Dogstar’ employee Todd Millias. For a short web animation it was a little bit more complicated than we were expecting. Especially the opening shot that is a track down from the city into a dungeon where there are a whole heap of these ‘bean’ characters working. I think Todd threw that in to give me a challenge haha.
(camera moves down from city to bean worker word)
Roseline and I split the work up so that I would do the backgrounds, effects and the animation in the dungeon scenes and she would do all the character animation in the cloud 9 scenes. Working for the web it’s really important to reuse as much as possible and after spending a year working on ‘Dogstar’ it was hard to change our wasteful ways of creating millions of new symbols. Rose did some really beautiful character animation of the main ‘bean’. He looked like a character out of those old 30-40s informational cartoons with his wide happy smile. My ‘beans’ looked more like my ‘Mr Gough’ stuff with their dopy spaced out eyes.
(my dopy beans) (Roseline's beans in Cloud 9)
Speaking of ‘Mr Gough’, Roseline and I attended another comic ‘draw-off’ with fellow comic artists that took part in that 24hr challenge that happened last year. It was supposed to also be another 24hr comic but I wanted to do something a bit more planned and executed than ‘Kinetic’ and Roseline also wanted to bail early for her own reasons. So we both did about 3-4hrs which was a little weak on our part I hope the other guys did better (sorry yo!). Anyway Rose (check here) and I are doing two separate comics that we are going to combine into one AWESOME!!! large comic. My comic will be about ‘Mr Gough’ it will loosely follow where the short animation finishes off and it will all be done in full page and double page spreads. With this comic I’m putting a lot of effort into the design aspect and trying to make a ‘Mr Gough’ world. I’m taking some of my influence from what I remember ‘Super Mario World’ being like and also a bit of ‘Dr Seuss’ surrealness. There is one spread that Roseline and I co-wrote where a couple of characters (a fisherman and a frenchman) do a little song and Roseline is going to guest draw this as she will draw the singing poses very funny.
(first page)
Another comic that I’m sure you thought I have forgotten about ‘Vicious and Faust’. Since the webcomicnation comics have now caught up to where I left it here on the blog, there will be new issue put up every Saturday over the next few weeks (I’ll probably stick to only doing 13 episodes per series). I’ve already pencilled out 2 eps and it’s now a bit more character comedy like the first season. I’ve been reading John K’s blog a lot and he did a post a little while back about how artists seem to always be doing the same expressions that they should try and look for more interesting faces. ‘Vicious and Faust’ has always been my comic to experiment and try new things so I’m giving this a go and I’m pulling funny faces in my mirror and trying to sketch them.
(issue 17) (issue 18)
And finally ‘Porcelain’. Roseline and I are pushing to get this film out of the way. We’ve got a whole heap of stuff we’d like to move on with but we can’t touch that until this film is done. That isn’t to say we are going to rush out whatever, we’ve spent ages on this film and it has to be worth it. Hopefully by next week we’ll begin putting all our work into flash and I’ll start posting some more progress on this film.
(layout for scene on bridge)
Well there’s an update on what I’m up to. I hope you enjoyed all this new stuff. Tomorrow I’m going to put up a very old stop motion film Rob and I put together so stay tuned!
The first indy film by Dean Swanton and Timothy Merks!
It is a 'very' first film. The animation and continuity is terrible. It was all drawn with a mouse (which I'll use as my excuse) and animated in flash.
Winner of the ScreenWest award for writing at the Sunset Cinema's 'Grassroots' competition.
I’ve been resisting writing about “Runner” for awhile now because it was a film that left me pretty sore about a lot of things. Since these are the last days that it will be here before disappearing into the archive I better put something down.
“Runner” is the first film that received funding. A lot of people thought that I got funding all the time because I had produced 4 films beforehand but they were all self funded where I had complete control over everything. At the time it was only costing me $50 to make a film and that was money spent on minidv tapes, minidisk tapes and competition entry fees.
I used to apply for every funding grant that ScreenWest and the AFC had. I got knocked back from all of those with only a letter (I wasn’t doing any interviews at this stage). It was a little frustrating but like I said my films were cheap to make so I would go out and make my own film and put it in a festival. I had been winning a few awards here and there (I won heaps of fti memberships and short courses) and people at the festivals seemed to really enjoy my films so I felt I was doing ok and was still feeling pretty inspired. Finally it seemed a funding grant for me had just turned up. It was called “The Fly Initiative”. It was co-funded by ScreenWest, FTI and the ABC to produce a collection of short films up to 4minutes in length for the now defunct ABC digital FLY channel.
When Dean Swanton and I heard about this we got in contact with a few of our friends from our old animation course and suggested we co-create something with them. At the time they were in the middle of producing their own film so in the last week before the applications were to be submitted they sent over and email saying that they feel like they don’t have enough time to come up with something new and decided that they were going apply with the project that they were working on. Dean was a little bit sorer than I was about it. I didn’t mind as the project they were working on was looking pretty cool, unfortunately it was rejected later by Josh Reed (the funding overseer from the ABC) as he didn’t like that sort of film (the problem with people who like animation is that they aren’t very broad in what they like. Quite narrow minded on what animation should be and what it can’t be). So anyway Dean and I were left to come up with something fast. I decided that I would do a variation of the ‘Opening Doors’ film but make it darker like ‘Maggie and Tony’ and add in some action scenes. I then scrapped together whatever art I had to apply plus the usual show reel and cvs of all the crew and submitted it on the last day at the last hour.
So after a few weeks (maybe a month) we were called up and told we were short listed. (It was interesting to find out later that a lot of people thought since it was FLY tv it should be about flies but that just got your application tossed out) For some reason we didn’t do the interviews but we had two guys hired by FTI who pitched our ideas for us. We had to do a short meeting with them and give them any new images or whatever. Looking back on this now I would have argued this approach but at the time I was very excited thinking we were finally ‘making it’.
In another week or so later (making films through funding are about 3months of sitting on your hands) we found out we had been selected to produce a film WOOHOO! It was great to call Dean and tell him the good news. There was one problem though they thought it would work better as a 1minute film so we had pending script approval on our project. 1 minute to do a drama … are you crazy!?! Dean and I laughed this off as we were pretty arrogant with the success of our previous films that we were sure we could change their minds.
So later on there was the first big meeting all the people selected were sitting around the room with some mean egos (more the male filmmakers). There was this awesome competitive vibe back then. Dean and I used to compete quite bitterly with the “Davison Bro’s” as they used to take our awards. Heh we still compete a bit now but it’s more just friendly competition (If you thought we were taking too long with ‘Porcelain’ those guys received funding in the same round and they are still finishing their film). This day we saw who else was making films for this grant.
Ok so now begins the script amendments. From this experience I will never ever do any from of script writing by email. I’d rather have red pen underlines and notes in the margin plus some face to face with the person I’m working with. Josh Reed was the one I had to work with, I’d seen his film that he’d made. It was this stop motion that had these Rats in a prison. It was pretty stylish, a little crass here and there, but all up it was quite polished. We were two very different types of film makers and like I said before he had a very strong opinion on what works in animation and what doesn’t. With my stuff I’m not afraid to put drama into it. I don’t think animation should only be jokes and humour. At the time with all the south park and web cartoons that were everywhere I was really bored with all that immature, crass humour and I was really into reading indy comics about 20 something relationships and living in everyday life. This was something Dean and I shared an interest in, we thought well if it works for comics then there must be a market for this in animation. With a really great response from the audience for when we screened ‘Opening Doors’ we felt we had proved that point and wanted to develop it more. Now Josh and I sent the script back and forth a couple of times most of our arguments were about the drama lines he wanted them cut so it would get to the action quicker and I wanted them in to flesh out the characters more. The script began to lose its dark edge because when I get annoyed or frustrated my mind goes more absurd. (In ‘Existence’ Rose and Starehe had to stop me from changing the action fight scene into a Benny Hill chase scene) I finally got to a stage where I couldn’t take it anymore and I basically said “thanks for the opportunity but this is as far as I will go” Josh conceded and said that he really loved my art style and that even if he didn’t like the script I could go with what I wrote. I don’t really like what the film became through this process. I liked the original scripts feeling a lot more. I felt that I cut too much out of the character ‘Mike’ that he became quite plain. ‘Porcelain’ I hope will most likely be the film I wanted ‘Runner’ to be.
Something else that was taking it’s time was that our contracts weren’t coming through. We didn’t know at the time but FLY tv was on the chopping block, due to impending budget cuts to the ABC (There was speculation at the time that the ABC was being too anti-war which is why it received this budget cut). Finally (after the head of FTI put some pressure on) the contracts came through along with the news that FLY tv had been axed. It sort of took the sting out doing the film a bit because now they weren’t sure where the films would be screened. Another major problem for all the filmmakers was when we started we had around 6months to turn over our films after the waiting for these contracts we ended up with only a month and a bit. I think a few film makers had to pull out because of this. However what made matters worse for me was Dean my co-animator was leaving the country. In the original schedule we would have finished the film before he left but the schedule kept getting pushed back and back while we waited for the contracts. So in the end Dean was only able to do about 1-2 weeks work, he was also at the time doing 3 part-time jobs to earn money for his trip (a crazy working machine). He did an amazing amount of work in the time he had (he did nearly every shot with Sarah in it) but I was still left with a lot of work to do.
Recording the voices was a lot of fun. The person I got to play ‘Mike’ was a FTI class mate who I just thought was perfect for his character. Mike’s best friend was fun to cast Phil Jeng Kane who had been a great supporter of my films from the beginning and he also is a really good person to shoot the breeze with. He suited the slacker character he played haha. Adrian and Regan make another cameo in this film doing voices in the office. Adrian does that voice at the start when his computer has an error ‘god, why!’ if you look close you will notice it is hotmail that crashes his computer, this is an in-joke to our tafe animation course days. I always enjoy recording voices. I usually do a lot of takes and nearly always choose the first or second take.
During the day I was doing an animation course at FTI and at night I would be working until I couldn’t hold my WACOM pen no more. The backgrounds were probably the hardest. Each background took nearly a day to complete. I wanted everything to look like a real place so I tried to add in heaps of details. There are a lot of hidden references in my films to other films, comics and things that inspire me. I used a no outline style for this film as it is easier to animate with as you don’t have to worry about your line work as much and inbetweening is just moving blobs of colour around. The scene where ‘Mike’ has to dodge the staples was my first bit of extreme action animation. This gave me the confidence for ‘Existence’. I did plan to do a heap of after effects filters to this film but time didn’t allow it. The opening shot was put together by a new friend through the FTI animation course Daniel Pita. I drew up all the buildings and he put together and composited the camera move and the opening titles.
Near the end of the films completion when I had to drive down to Fremantle to attend my course I could only hold the wheel with my palms as my fingers were in pain. Sometimes now on cold days my hands hurt again, I really pushed every limit I had to get that film done on time. I’m pretty amazed at how much work I did with such little time.
Another person I really need to mention is the wonderful Perrina Bozanich. Another tafe animation course friend of Dean and me who had been doing all of our editing on our previous films. She was someone who was also badly affected by the contract delay. Her money job was working at burswood casino and she would work all kinds of weird hours and since we were running very late sometimes it would mean after she’d finish a shift at 3am and I’d be driving over there to give here the latest files or to pick up the latest edit. She worked so hard and lost way too much sleep. It got to the point where she was falling asleep at the dealing table. With us both tired we were getting a little short with each other but we pushed through it and got it done. Also thanks to Craig as I’m sure I upset his sleep as well with him worrying about Perrina. ‘Runner’ was the last project we did together also the last project I did with Dean, it is almost like a band splitting up to pursue our solo careers. We took a bit of flak about being auteur film makers that need to learn to work in a team but our team was dam strong and that’s why we produced such great work.
I also have to mention Adrian Tolman who recorded a lot of the sound effects and did the first sound mix. Adrian was really hindered by what he could do since he was the last of the last people to get stuff. Through the grant we had Richard Mahoney from Toad Hall studios doing the final sound mix. It was a great and fun experience to have him work on my film. He had a great bag of tricks and he was very direct with what worked and what doesn’t. It really bought some scenes out a lot more. He had to do something on every film some films he did from scratch, an amazing amount of work and all of it very high quality.
Oh the music! I was suggested a group to check out called ‘K’ they were this cool jazz group. Adrian and I went along to their show and really enjoyed it I caught up with one of the members during their break and asked if they were interested in scoring this film for me. They seemed really happy and wanting to do it. That’s what is cool about Perth is there really is a lot of great talent around and most of ther people are pretty friendly. They were also a bit rushed but even still they produced a great score. I did have an interesting trip home from their show I was caught by a booze bus (by an American policeman) and had to sit in the big bus and was retested, I was still over the second time so then I went further into the bus and was retested by this crazy looking machine the senior officer did all these math calculations and I got my printout at being 0.049 just under enough to get off. The American cop was pretty cool and we even laughed about it. Adrian on the other hand got a good telling off by the female policewomen for letting me drive. Funny night!
So after the film was handed in we were told that they were going to make a DVD (I think it took nearly 2 years before we got those dvds) and eventually screen it on the ABC before RAGE. We had to do a little spiel in front of the camera about our film. I was so tired at the time, you can really see it (I should upload that footage at some point).
After finishing this film I wasn’t happy with it. When it played I used to cover my eyes and one occasion I walked out of the cinema as I couldn’t even watch it (except for when it was on the ABC that was kinda cool). For a long time this has been the film I liked the least, my biggest regret. I’m not allowed to say this anymore because this is the first film of mine that Roseline saw. After seeing this film she saw me as someone with depth and emotion and to her it is quite a special film and I guess for that reason it has become quite special to me.
The egos between the film makers that took part in this Initiative seemed to lessen after all the films were done. There was a great respect for everyone who survived the harsh deadline. You would enjoy sharing your war stories and laugh about how crazy it was. The real shame is the closure of the Fly channel. This could have been a recurring event and some of the film makers could have gone on and started making a TV series. 1 step forward 2 steps back it seemed. It did promote the talent of the WA animation industry and by bringing people together it showed that there is an industry. There is hope though with people beginning to watch the digital channels more and ABC now has its ABC2 channel maybe something like this will happen again. I’d be ready to do it all again.
Runner
directed by
Timothy Merks and Dean Swanton
written by
Timothy Merks
Mike: Reuben Herriman
Sarah: Gillianne Richards
Ed: Phil Jeng Kane
John: Phillip Biggs
Music by: Graeme Blevins and Grant Windsor
Sound effects by: Adrian Tolman
Edited by: Perrina Bozanich
Opening Titles by: Daniel Pita
Funded by: "FLY TV INITIATIVE" ABC, ScreenWest and FTI
Well here's a very old film by me. My third year student film, "Monster From The Hill".
Through the course I was exposed to German expressionist cinema and that had quite an impact on me and SBS was running Hammer horror films ever Saturday night. So when I got my chance to make my film it was definitely going to be an old style studio horror film.
Ok like I did for "Jim" here's some behind the scenes notes. Most of my friends just remember it as a blur (this film is about 6-7 years old) so I guess I'll just tell you what I remember hopefully they will correct my mistakes:
Adrian Tolman (who now does the sound for all my films) was my offsider on this film. He basically did all the jobs I didn't want to do. Most of that was asking the head of Tafe for more money. He was pretty dam good at this as we were never turned down a single dollar (I heard that Tafe went well over budget that year, although that I believe was another filmmakers fault who was a jerk)
One of the most major influences for this film was the fact that we had all seen Tim Burton's "Edwood" and we shot this film very similar only using one take for almost everything. This was more due to the fact that we were shooting on film and we only had 2 reels to use. We did rehearse a lot before we shot. Oh and the Lugosi line "Let's shoot this f**ker" was said for nearly every take.
"The Monster" was played by Jason Rado. A very old friend of mine who was living with me at the time. He was brilliant. He studied the part hard and was very pro about it all. One of the things that I found out as we were rehearsing was that he had problems saying "th" sounds instead he would say them with an "f" sound. I'd known this guy for years and never realised that he did that and to top it off nearly every sentence contained "mother" or "father" in it. Credit to Jason however because he continued to practice everyday until he got it right.
The brick walls were these brilliant flats that were lent to me from "Plumb Construction". I was doing work experience there (which I got through a wonderful teacher who taught me art direction at TAFE) working on some "Powerball" commercials. This was so much fun even though I was positively useless with power tools. While I was working there I was telling them about this film and they pointed me to these 3meter+ (guess) wall flats and said they would be perfect. This was exactly what I needed but at the same time I had to work out how to transport them to the TAFE studio. They were too big for a trailer (which we found out didn't we Adrian?) so instead we used a large trolley and had to wheel these very real looking walls across Perth (comedy gold). It was harder to get the walls back as about the start of our journey across the city a nut fell off one of the wheels and we had to do it very slowly. I remember one girl feeling compelled to yell out "you guys look stupid". Still to this day I have not been able to think of a good comeback... dang it
The film was shot on 16mm B&W and the cinematography was done by Geremy Rouse. He with his team was really very good and they spent a heap of time making sure everything was lit well and framed well. I think we spent a lot of the time wanting the other to work faster but at the same time we wanted the best. It was a pretty good combo I thought.
I do remember the day we did the test shoot I had to call Geremy up and tell him to shoot without me as the train I was on ran over someone. This day I just happened to be wearing "The many deaths of Kenny" t-shirt. I haven't worn that shirt since that day.
The "Monster's Claw" was made from a welding glove, some op shop belts, and this really cool bendy metal we found. I'm not too sure what the influence was for this. Maybe Joe Mad.
I'm a huge fan of Doug Tennaple and I loved the game he created called "The Neverhood". In this game everything had this plasticine texture to it that I thought was pretty dam cool (Rob Lee and I even did a very heavily influenced animation based on this style which I'll post soon). We used this style for the outer walls of the Laboratory.
The laboratory was built by Michael Lewis. A good friend of mine who I left in charge to build the 1.5meter laboratory based on this crazy little sketch we did. This madman worked non-stop digesting only coke and caffeinated ice-cream for a week straight (maybe longer). You may notice the little spikes on top of the Laboratory and the very wonky base. The top of that Lab contains a good amount of Mike's blood.
The laboratory is still standing today (of its own accord) in the corner of my room. Masterful craftsmanship!
The street sets were built by me and this more resembled the German expressionist film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". I built the set out of cereal boxes, masking tape, black plasticine to round the edges and I had a foam base to help with keeping the stop mo characters upright. When I brought the set to the TAFE studio, I did the mistake of leaving it in the car and all the plasticine melted. Due to the fact we were shooting at the time and Mike couldn't do anymore work because of the coke and caffeinated ice cream for a week, I called in Rob Lee to take over and repair the set. This added the Rob Lee style to the set and I think it was better for it.
The animation was probably the only thing we shot twice and that was due to the bolex camera chewing the film. This was quite heartbreaking but the news was delivered well by Will Jones who said "Hey Tim, I've got some bad news the film in the bolex was all chewed so yeah ...OH OH SPAGETTIOS!” (South park episode where they sent up Jar-Jar). I couldn't be mad after that instead I got Adrian to ring around (see I told you I got him to do everything I didn't like) the other film makers and try and get whatever leftover film they had. We reshot the animation using the frame capture on the Arton (since I didn't want to trust the bolex again) this function is more for capturing slates so when I got the film back I had to digitally process every frame and add lightning over the top to smooth the transitions.
The films score was composed by Chris Cobilis. This is my favourite score for all my films. I had so much stuff to choose from. It had this really dark and wonderful, edgy style. The end credits are extra long so I could fit in the entire last song. I used to listen to the tape all the time. I gave it to Adrian years ago to convert it to Mp3. One day he will get around to it.
There’s a special track that only a few have heard. One that will get stuck in your head for years. I hope to be able to post that at some point.
The film had to be edited twice due to it being deleted off the Media 100s at TAFE. I was really broke at the time and had to work down in Manjimup and could only come up on weekends. Mike did quite a lot of the re-editing while I was in Manjimup. I never credited him for this because I was too lazy to re-render the end credits.
I did no animation on this film due to having very shaky hands. I regret this but it was good to have so many friends to help me out
My friends used the last bit of film to hold up a big white sign saying “Tim sux” do some crazy dancing and pull finger signs. Haha thanks guys!
Ok this film needs an introduction. This film started out as a satire of films being made at the same time (from what I was seeing at festivals and my own films :P) where the main character would v/o how miserable his life is and if only his achey heart could heal and at the end some pretty girl would turn up change his life or something. I hated that, it felt like writers were living out their fantasies. So this was an anti film to that. Also I was dragging in elements from around me with my friends and myself whinging about how bad everything is. So I decided to give this film a message "shut up it's not so bad you could be being mauled by a bear" which I think is a great message they should give it out at gift stores, put it on the back of cars or whatever.
Some interesting production notes where:
The piano music composed by Alison Derby each song title was variations of "Tim is poo", "Tim likes poo" and "Tim eats poo". Such classy titles for such beautiful piano loops. This is what happens when you don't pay your crew.
This contained my first time using traditional hand drawn animation. Mostly I draw straight into flash but for the sequence where Jim was running inside I used pencil in paper (of course I coloured it all in flash)
The movie stubbs for their first date was for the movie "Raging Bull".
I designed Jim's apartment with a Dutch culturalNick knacks. Such as the plates on the wall of windmills and the Porcelain figurines on the TV. (The chairs from Africa... I don't know what I was thinking with those)
The Bear was based on my amusement of Yogi bear. I loved how they gave the bear a collar so you wouldn't realise they were replacing the head when they did lipsync. Also hats and ties on bears is funny. This bear is making a few appearances in the Cat and Rabbit universe
The bear sounds were stolen (gasp!) from a nature doco. I don't know what one I'll have to get that info from Adrian.
Perrina did all my scouting for voice talent and would send me audio clips and I would judge who I wanted. When I went over to record the voice for "Jim" I came to realise that the actor had recently had a partner who had left him and they had planted a tree together. So I got to say that was a real awkward experience (Thanks Perrina! haha)
Another thing about the actor was during takes he ...uh had a few drinks. Amusing times with the line "A beer? A BEER!"
The film was screened for the last Sunset Cinemas "Grassroots". Possibly the greatest festival that WA had. Unfortunately that company lost the rights to the Kings Park venue which is now been take over by Moonlight cinemas who don't hold a short film competition. I should be more annoyed by this but people in WA know how to fuck up a good thing.
My favourite comment about this film was yelled at the screen by a guy sitting near us at the Grassroots festival. "THAT'S STUPID, WHY WAS THERE EVEN A BEAR IN IT!". He didn't have any problems that it has a hat and tie or that really doesn't even look like a bear (I should have at least used one reference photo).
Shucks howdy, how y'all doing? I hope you are all well and I hope you are digging the new look.
So on thy right you have a whole new set of pretty buttons. The film ones take you to the Youtube where you can watch the full films. It be great if you could rate the films and if you are feeling even more awesome scratch on down a comment in the comment box. There are a few more films left to upload so I suggest you subscribe to me.
Now for the even newer and cooler thing is my brand spankin new account with "Web Comics Nation". You can now read the entire "Kinetic" and my "Cat and Rabbit" comic in a much easier way. You may have been wondering where your latest "Vicious and Faust" comic is. Well since setting up this new account I've started "Vicious and Faust" back at issue 1 this means there will be no new comic until the 10th of March. Sorry about this but it gives me more time to work on "Porcelain" and you will appreciate it more on that website than here on this blog.
So Youtube for films, Webcomicsnation for comics what's this blogspot account for? Well since "Porcelain" will start becoming more digital again I'll be posting updates on that. This site will also serve as a link to those other 2 accounts and hopefully I can post some behind the scenes stuff here.
Ok let us know what you think about the blogs new look and since I ask for so much, here's a breakdown of "Vicious and Faust" issue 15. From the pencil rough, to the colouring and finally the glossy effects that were done in flash 8. If you want to know how I did it ask away.
ROD CHIMPO: SPACE MONKEY written by: Timothy Merks, Gregory James and ChristienClegg Character designs/Animation Direction: Timothy Merks Animators Tan TeckWeng Christien Clegg Gregory James Roseline Lau Timothy Merks Background Design: Gregory James Sound Mix/Music: Adrian Tolman Foley Daniel Pita Gregory James Christien Clegg Recorded by: Chris Hunt Produced through: FTI Cadsa program
