my other light princess video diaries

here are parts three and four of my Light Princess video diaries:

I didn't make any more after part four . . . I did film myself a little more after this, but a lot of the animation-work we had done got cut because of script changes so I sounded a bit depressed and it wouldn't be much fun to watch me sitting on the roof of the National Theatre in the rain telling you that.  And then I stopped filming the video diaries completely as we kept up with the changes to the work during all the previews . . . it's tricky making animations for live theatre, I guess it would be fun to do again sometime, but it takes up a lot of your energy trying to remain nice.

The Light Princess - Matthew's video diaries parts one & two

I filmed myself while I was making the animations, mainly so I had someone to talk to.  Why don't you watch parts one and two here . . .

The Light Princess - designing and animating a scene

The process of making little films for this musical is a bit different to how I normally work, there are more people in the chain that links the first sketches to showing an audience, so I thought I would show you some of the process.  This is a scene that got cut from the show during script re-writes.

This scene is from the prologue, an animated cartoon at the beginning of the show, played on the big screen, like at the cinema, and a voiceover sung by a couple of actors.  The prologue explains the back story and introduces some of the characters.  I know . . you know what a prologue is.  ok - here is my first storyboard for this scene to show my ideas to the director, writer and designer:

This is Althea (the light princess) attempting to knight someone but losing grip of the sword and floating away (she has no gravity and these scenes were intended to show different variations on that idea).

They liked it but suggested she probably shouldn't be-head someone.  I changed it to his hand, it has to be funny, doesn't it?

I also changed the format to fit within the frame designed by Rae Smith the designer, a slightly more 4:3 shape.  Depending on whether the characters in the prologue are also performed by actors in the live elements of the show affected how I drew them to some extent.  My cut-out versions of the characters would have to look in some way the same as Rae Smith's costume designs.

Sir Tom was just a prologue character so it was up to me to do what I want, and Althea is seen here as a 5 year old girl, so the only design stipulation was to give her red hair.

Althea's father, the King, got added to this scene a little later and he is in the show all the way through so his cut-out version has to refer to the on-stage version.  I like to do this mostly with attitude and one or two strong shapes rather than try to recreate any kind of accurate silhouette.

I have to balance my own animated world feeling cohesive with looking like it is has some place within the world of Rae's stage designs.  We worked a lot with adding block areas of colour and general themes of yellow, round and softer (Lagobel) versus blue spiky and colder / darker (Sealand), or Tintin and Moomins as Rae helpfully described it for me.  

The next stage was to animate a test version.

The animations are made mostly from cut out black card - some of the characters are puppets with moving joints, others just have a few replacement parts, the repetition of using small sequences of replacement parts suits the 2D block colour shapes and the low frame rate.

Sir Tom has a walk cycle made of 3 sets of legs:

Here you can watch the scene (althea is bald, I hadn't worked out how to do her hair yet):

The next step is to show the director and designer and get a bit of feedback.  Marianne Elliott (the director) suggested we added the King pushing / forcing his daughter on, showing that she is reluctant to take anything seriously (Althea, not Marianne) so every element of the scene is moving the story forward and enforcing the bits that are important for the audience to understand (not just that a floating girl comes and chops a man's hand off).

Each character I animate separately and then we (that is Emma Pile and Lawrence Rowell who worked with me on this) would layer them together to create the finished picture.  We built this into our system to it would be easier to edit and make inevitable timing changes once the show started to develop.  

We hadn't quite lined up the king fully here to match Althea's movements (after effects doesn't like my low frame rates), and Althea doesn't have red hair yet, but the scene got cut from the script before we needed to take it any further.  

The people walking across the screen are Lagobellans. they live in the kingdom, I used them to wipe on and off between scenes to create transitions that would feel innate and keep the animation alive and moving forward and not use fades or cuts.  If you've seen the show that ideal ALMOST survived the process . . not quite, but enough.  

Althea's movement has a few extra pieces to enable all the movements.  Working this way with replacement pieces means you have to think through the characters movement and what they are going to do once they are on screen before you switch on the camera.  There is still room for spontaneity, often a little accidental slip of the puppet can be turned to your advantage  - here I didn't plan to have her sway back and forth with the sword but it just came about as I was animating the scene and I liked it.  

Most of the scenes I just film one take -  although I might loose a bit of accuracy or finesse I think it captures the life a lot better.  I once heard someone talk about having a rock and roll swagger in their work and that appeals to me, although I've used that phrase twice out loud when working with a  director, hoping to explain how my puppets will work and there has been a flash of panic both times.  Or maybe they think I sound pretentious.  

The Light Princess horse animation test

here's another thing from my animations for The Light Princess, I'm not sure if this horse is staying or not now, I think i ran out of screen-time for it:

the little match girl passion: shadow world

The central figure in this story is obviously the match girl herself, and this means the way everything else is described visually has to lead out of the way she is made.  I use shadow puppets to portray her in this, and so other parts of the story either go forward from this - her visions for example are "extra" real in that they are 3D painted models, so they feel hyper-real to her, a cardboard girl, and then other people - the anonymous crowds in the city - are smudgey chalk animated loops, they have no individual character, no discernible strength or edges, but rather are lumps of storytelling devices, I imagined Carol by Patricia Highsmith when I was thinking of the crowd scenes, 1930s or 40s busy wintery crowds getting on with stuff in the city, and nothing to do with us or the story we are here to listen to, well, except to judge, maybe, as this is a Passion.  

In earlier shows I have projected the shadow puppets and backgrounds simultaneously from an O.H.P. onto a screen, but here, as my processes have developed over the last couple of years, I am creating a much more layered piece, building up cut-out painted skyscrapers, the chalk animations, little models with lights and holes and clear coloured plastic - I perform the black cut-out cardboard shadow puppets in front of the camera, or sometimes behind a paper screen, like they did in the olden days . . . and it's still basically light and shadows, and here this means that a lot of the main puppet figures of the match girl are almost little cardboard automata - like two of my favourite artists Paul Spooner and Tim Hunkin - with one or two little functions to each perform to tell a specific piece of the story. 

I made a video that explains a bit more of this and shows you some of the puppets actually moving . . . 

The Little Match Girl Passion: making the 3D world of her visions

So I've been working on The Little Match Girl Passion again this week.  In this live-animation I'm making for it I'm trying to create a world that is three-dimensional but made up of 2-D flat layers - drawn animations projected onto paper screens, paper cut-out shadow puppets, and here is the city for example, buildings drawn onto corrugated card and laid out in parallel formations . . .

when the match girl has her visions, however - when she strikes a match to keep warm and beautiful things reveal themselves in its glow - I wanted to make these in a different way, and I thought it would be somehow extra-real in this 2-D environment if everything in the visions was an actual three-dimensional object, like this dining room table at Christmas.  The white plate behind the cake in this picture is empty because its where the goose was, but in her vision the goose jumps up and runs away.

Here is a video where I show you some of these scenes I've built this week, and a couple of the puppets that live in those worlds . . .

The Little Match Girl Passion crowd animations

I've been working on some of the background animations for David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion that I'm making a live-animation for, commissioned by Opera North, and wanted to show you some of it.  I've only done a very rough edit so far - rough in terms of compositing, the visual side of it I'm happy with.  I mostly use animations in live shows to create skies, weather conditions, journeys - things that don't have actual people or animals in, and I was trying to justify why it was okay to have some things live and some things as filmed animations if there were people in the scenes, but to me I feel that the looping crowd scenes echo the looping text in the music, and I think its a way of saying to you as the viewer you can disregard these big groups of people as anything more important than all you see here, they are like the clouds going by, or the snow, repeating and never-ending, the brain gets the hang of a loop quite quickly I think and disengages if it looks like nothing is going to happen other than repetition, so I will be able to then puppet the main character  - the match girl - live in front of these crowds.  Its her story, it happens to be happening right now as we tell this story, whereas there will always be a crowd, the city is a never ending loop of anonymous people.  Maybe I need to condense those sentences down a bit if I want to try and talk about this again, haha, but I hope you understand what I mean.

I'm working in charcoal for this, it has a dirty and dusty quality that feels suitable, kind of like I'm drawing with her burnt out matches, and actually when I opened the packet, i'd not bought this variety before, it looked like a little prop from a puppet film for her matches . . .

I was inspired to work this way watching William Kentridge's films.  I'm sure other people work this way too, but I haven't seen anyone else with such a confident rawness.   The basic technique is to draw an image, take a shot, erase it and draw the next image over the top, and as you erase each image and move forward it leaves behind a ghostly trace of the sequence.

And also as bits of charcoal crumble off (if you are working on a horizontal flat surface) they build up nicely around where the crowd's feet are supposed to be and look like footprints and dirty snow.

In my head I was trying to live in the worlds of Edward Gorey,  Joel Stewart and Lemony Snicket, which would be a strange but fun world. . . .

Here is a rough edit of the film:

I cover Pretty Poison by Sal Bernardi

I made this video cover-version of Sal Bernardi's Pretty Poison to test out a new camera and also try some clever (but not that clever really) editing things . . .