The Birth of the Flying Machine

Company founder and producer of The Flying Machine, Hugh Welchman, lets us in on the genesis of his magical tribute to Chopin and the power of music.

Anna takes to the skies on The Flying Machine

On 15^th March I flew to Wroclaw, at the invitation of Minister Zdrojewski, to take part in the 60th birthday celebrations of Polish Animation. It was 3 weeks after I had won the Oscar (for Peter and the Wolf) and offers had been flooding in to BreakThru suggesting what BreakThru should do next.

At the end of the evening the Minister said  he had an idea. He proposed that BreakThru would make another half hour animation for families in Poland, featuring the music of Chopin, and to be part of the 200^th Anniversary celebrations of Chopin’s birth in 2010.

During the production of Peter and the Wolf I had decided that I liked working in Poland, and that it could offer a range of interesting possibilities for the future so I set up BreakThru Films Poland in July 2007, and my Polish team kick-started various small scale entrepreneurial ventures. Making an animated film featuring the music of Chopin seemed like an ideal choice to be BreakThru Films Poland’s first big project… I was very interested in his suggestion.

Like most English people my age my knowledge of classical music is very poor. In school music classes we would sing the Beatles, and my parents predilection for classical music made it seem stuffy in my eyes. But producing Peter and the Wolf, which came about because of the fact I was approached by a conductor who was interested in collaborations between film and live orchestra, had opened me up to classical music. I have probably listened to Peter and the Wolf more than anyone on the planet (apart from Peter and the Wolf’s writer and director, Suzie Templeton), and this got me into all of Prokofiev’s repertoire. I knew a lot about Prokofiev and his music, but that was pretty much it…

I knew Chopin by name, probably had heard his pieces at home as a kid (my step-father plays the piano well), but wouldn’t have been able to recognise a single piece of his music. I went out and bought his complete works, shut myself in a room and started listening to his music. I was guided in what I was listening to by my friend and long-time collaborator, Geoff Lindsey, who literally knows more about classical music than anyone on the planet. Certain things struck me immediately:

1. Apart from a couple of piano concertos, Chopin basically wrote short pieces for solo piano, and this is what he was famous for.
2. Chopin didn’t write music to stories; his music was very abstract.

With Peter and the Wolf we had a narrative piece of music; we had characters; we had a well known story. My first reaction was to try and make Chopin into Prokofiev: we would take Chopin’s great tunes and we would orchestrate them, so we could have a big orchestra, and we could create a film that we would accompany with live orchestra, like Peter and the Wolf. I was also mad into break-dancing at the time, I can’t remember why, and decided early on that I wanted the film to be a break-dance film. I just thought that combining Chopin’s tunes with break-dancing would be great.

I put together a working group of my trusted collaborators. Writer Marianela Maldonado and her husband and writing partner, Robin Todd, and writer Geoff Lindsey. They were to be the film’s writers. Marianela and Robin with their wild and wonderful imaginations, tempered by Geoff, the voice of classical music reason. And also in the working group my chosen director’s Martin Clapp and Adam Wrywas. Adam was our lead animator on Peter and the Wolf, a man with wild passion and magic hands. Martin Clapp was the reclusive head of layout and also an animator on Peter and the Wolf, who had impressed me recently with the waterfall of great ideas that streamed out of him in a recent brainstorming discussion with Director Frank Budgen about his film ShockHeaded Peter.

We were a pretty chaotic and motley collection, marshaled strictly by me. I had decided by the time of our first brain-storming sessions:

1. We were going to use tristesse (Opus 10 no.3) as the theme tune for our film.
2. It was going to be a musical and will feature breakdancing to Chopin. I had completely fallen for the artistic talents of choreographer and musical show director, Kate Prince, whose breakdance show, Into the Hoods, I had recently gone to see. And I brought her into our script sessions.
3. I had been totally converted to Chopin by this stage, having listened to his music constantly for 2 months, and had come round to what Geoff had been telling me from the beginning- that if we were to do a film celebrating the music of Chopin- it would have to mainly feature his pieces for solo piano, and to make our lives easier, agreed with Geoff that we should restrict ourselves to the Études, as it fitted with the educational remit of what we were doing.

Martin wanted to make a film about magic or aliens. Marianela wanted to write Marianela-style grim fairy tales. Adam wanted to do the most beautiful animation in the world ever. Geoff wanted everyone to really appreciate the genius of Chopin. Kate I think was only ever marginally interested; I think our link to film interested her, and there was a certain curiosity as to the fact we wanted to do dance in animation.

At that stage I was working on a number of projects, most of which were feature films, and therefore commercially more viable than what was then labeled Project Chopin. We couldn’t do a feature film, because there was no way that we had either the time or the funding opportunities to do a stop-motion feature film.

But I had started something, and I was being pushed hard by my Polish trainee Producer, Magda Bargiel, who sensed that we had the opportunity to do a special project in Poland. Marianela and Robin were furiously outputting scripts to my brief that were getting lukewarm reactions from the directors and from Geoff. Marianela and Robin had been talking a lot with Martin, and they shared a lot in common in their tastes for the fantastical and magical in animation, and were bugging me to widen the brief. Begrudgingly I agreed, and I opened the lid on a whole range of robot, magic aliens, monsters and all sorts! Throughout this process Geoff was feeding us YouTube links and examples, and laying Chopin’s  études over all sorts of material- Polish skater videos, Woody Allen films, breakdancing. There was an emormous amount of research and ideas being generated through the scripting process.

One of the problems was that everything that Mari wrote Martin did these wonderful inspiring magical illustrations for, I wanted to make every one of the films that was in Martin’s drawings. But they were Trojan horses, smuggling other stories onto a vehicle that was for Chopin. I reigned the Trojan horse back in, but some of the magical ideas and fantasy from this explosion of different paths remained.

In this process of scripts and drawings Martin drew, inspired by the Lazienki Park Monument, a Flying Piano. Even the first thumbnails were beautiful, and it was the first piece that everyone got behind. It appealed to Adam’s sense of beauty, it appealed to Martin, Robin and Mari’s sense of fantasy, and Geoff and Marek thought it a beautiful metaphor for the transporting beauty of Chopin’s music. The Flying Machine became our anchor.

Mari and Martin immediately untethered it and we went flying off in all directions. I kept bringing it back to Poland; back to the fact I wanted a dance in there; back to the fact that the music wasn’t the soundtrack but needed to be the emotional core of the film.


- Hugh Welchman

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