Loving Vincent's diary - 7th week (Oscar night)

BreakThru's producer Hugh Welchman (Oscar Winner for producing BreakThru's Peter and the Wolf) and painter/director Dorota Kobiela (director of BreakThru's Little Postman and Chopin's Drawings) are co-writing BreakThru's latest film, Loving Vincent, the world's first feature length painting animation film. The film is a mystery thriller looking into the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh, and is told through bringing over 120 of Vincent's masterpieces to animated life...

The script is on its fourth, and final, draft, and wth production scheduled for spring 2013, the pressure is mounting. This weekly diary will candidly record their process of writing the elusive final draft.

Loving Vincent's diary - 7th week (Oscar night)

Well today is the 5^th anniversary of the night I won an Oscar. So I thought I would write a blog on the Oscars. I warn you there is not much Vincent content in this one… He’ll be back to centre stage in the next one!

The Oscars meant very little to me before 2008. Peter and the Wolf was the first one of my films that I actually submitted to the Oscars.

At film school all the people around me where very focused on Cannes, that was seen as the prestige event, and for animators it was Annecy. The Oscars was this distant American thing that seemed to get everyone excited. I remember promising one of my friends, who had just done well with his internet start-up, and who invested in Peter and the Wolf, that we would of course win the Oscar, not really thinking it was that big of a deal. When we were nominated then I noticed it was a big deal. All of a sudden I was getting 100’s of emails a day, from people I knew and from people I didn’t. This would culminate on the day after winning when I received 3,000 emails in 24 hours.

Two weeks before the Oscars I travelled out to California, and we went on a tour showing all of the Oscar nominated short films at the studios: Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, ILM, Sony Pictures. There was a lot of hanging around, a lot of playing table tennis. Table tennis is big among animators on the west coast it seems. I arrived at one studio, Disney I think, and a guy came up to me and asked me if I was the producer of Peter and the Wolf. I was flattered that he had heard of the film, and that he was fan enough to seek me out. But it turned out his friend from DreamWorks had called ahead and said that I played a mean game of table tennis, and he was the studio no.1 and wanted to challenge me! I was also hanging out with all the other nominees and got to see their films many times. I was confident that we were the front-runner. There was another stop-motion, Madame Tutli-Putli, which had startling technique of combining real eyes with stop motion puppets, but that’s all I remember about the film, I don’t really recall the film, it was kind of a one trick pony. There was a half hour painting-animation melodrama from Petrov, My Love, which I did love, but I felt it was too melodramatic for most tastes. There was a lovely CG French film about pigeons, but not significant enough in style or story to challenge, and then there was ‘Where was the Walrus’ and innovative film about John Lennon. I thought this had an outside chance, but Peter and the Wolf had story, charm, humour and style, so quite honestly I expected my name to be called out.

The Oscars, appropriately, takes place in a shopping mall. Yet this pedestrian precinct is covered with red velvet, tacked on, stapled in, giant gold statues made of plastic are rolled in, and the venue is transformed. And once you see all the starlets and stars walking down the sidewalk, now a glistening red carpet, and under the glare of the lights and the flashlights, tinsel town comes to glamorous life. I walked down the catwalk next to George Clooney and Halle Berry. You can imagine that there weren’t many bulbs flashing in my direction. However as I had the foresight to smuggle in my Peter puppet we did get some attention. People like dolls.

When my name was called out, even though I expected it, I had a huge feeling of elation. Also relief. I had promised people this, and by the time it came to the Oscars I realised that this prize is by far and away considered the greatest prize you can win in film, and it is not something I should have promised! But, it worked out. And over the next few weeks I learnt just how highly the world regards the Oscars, and what store they set by it. I think with Loving Vincent we will have a chance at being nominated for Best Feature Animation. This category is dominated by Disney and Pixar with films normally made for around $200m, 20 times the budget we will have, but I think if we make an involving story, as well as having the most stunning visual style, that we can stand a chance. In the year I went up with Peter and the Wolf we were the favourites, if we get to be there with Loving Vincent we will be the plucky little underdogs, that has a Vincent-esque feel to it. He was the insider (in the art world) who was always the outsider. As someone who has won one Oscar I guess I am on one level an insider, but I live in Northern Poland far away from the Movie industry, and I engage in projects that attract the labels of ‘artistic’ within the industry. I don’t have any friends who are agents or actors, I don’t know any people who work at the studios, it still feels like another world that happens somewhere else, I still feel an outsider.

I will be fast asleep by the time the Oscars get announced tonight. But I predict that it will be a clean sweep for Disney. Wreck it Ralph and Frankenweenie are superior films to Brave (beautiful look but a weak and derivative story by Pixar’s groundbreaking standards); Paranorman and Pirates (for me the weakest stop motion film ever to come out of the wonderful Aardman Animation studio). This year there are only studio films in the mix, but interestingly three out of the five are stop-motion. For me Frankenweenie is Tim Burton’s best film since Edward Scissorhands. I am not a huge fan of his style, but the girl with her cat, and the science teacher are brilliant, the film gets a bit OTT at the end, but definitely a success. And much as I hate films that have inane content – a film about computer games????- I was blown away by the entertainment value of Wreck it Ralph- incredible inventive directing- why can’t they just use that awesome directing skill, technical brilliance and general film making mastery to tell stories that are about something that matters?

In the Short Animation category I hope Disney’s Paperman wins. The style is amazing, and the animation is really great. It fell down a bit as a story in the last third, but it was a pleasure to watch (especially in 3D). Wow if Paperman and Frankenweenie win it will be not only a double for Disney, but also a double for Black and White! The other shorts… Fresh Guacamole (no idea how this got nominated); Maggie Simpson short (not the Simpson’s finest hour- shouldn’t win); Adam and Dog (a few nice images at the start, but atmosphere doesn’t make up for the boredom, shocked that it was nominated) and finally Head over Heels from my old school, National Film and Television School. This is a very clever idea, and an epic achievement for a graduation film, but they puppet design is poor, and really they should have told the story in 6 minutes, not 11 minutes, it would have more impact. Still half of my sleeping brain will be rooting for them- to win an Oscar with your student film, that’d be something.

At the moment I tend to watch feature length documentaries, particularly biopics, because it fits with the story work we are doing for Loving Vincent. However it was refreshing over the past couple of days to watch all of the animation nominees. Refreshing but not inspiring, with the exception of Paperman there was nothing visually fresh or exciting.

Animation, despite representing films that go toe to toe with any blockbusters (Pixar/Disney far outrank any other studio in blockbusters and profitability) at the Oscars is still a sideshow compared to live action. By the time the animation winners are getting their rare chance to mix it up at parties with the Hollywood glamour set (an Oscar gets you into any party in LA tonight), the red-carpets will be already rolled up and the shopping mall will be restored, and I will be setting out on my 15km morning run through fresh snow to our big empty studio… which will someday soon start to be filled with painters…. And after they paint 56,800 paintings, over the next 2 years, then maybe Loving Vincent will also be a Cinderella for one night, propelled briefly into the West Coast lime light of Tinsel Town.

by Hugh Welchman

Tim Allen - Interview with an Animator

BreakThru talks to animator extraordinaire Tim Allen about his life in animation, Tim Burton and his incredible work on Peter & The Wolf and Magic Piano.

Tim Allen on the set of Corpse Bride

- When did you first become interested in stop-motion animation? Were you interested in art as a child?

Yeah, I was always drawing, making models and reading comics. I think my earliest ambitions were to make comic strip cartoons along the lines of Garfield, and I copied this format with vampire and ghost characters. As a teenager I’d moved on to Batman and my dream had now progressed to drawing superheros (or maybe being one!). I opted out of conventional A-levels in favour of a 2 year Art Diploma, as we knew I was going down the road of an artistic career. At this stage, I honestly can say I hadn’t even considered you could animate for a living!  

Somewhat lost for what to do after my art course, I was looking at modelmaking degrees and accidently stumbled upon an animation degree. At this time Nightmare Before Christmas had recently come out in cinemas & the idea of working on something like that just blew me away. Cheesy as it sounds, it was a moment of complete certainty, a true calling. I looked around & found a very good stop motion course at Glamorgan University and my very first animated steps began...

- How did you first 'break into the industry'? Was there a particular project that helped solidify your interest into a career?

It was tough getting going and those that get a break shortly after college I think are the very lucky ones. As I graduated, the industry was just starting a quiet patch which was leaving lots of established professionals on the job hunt. I contacted & tried to visit pretty much every stop motion company in the UK. In retrospect it was good experience in that it taught me who was who in the stop motion world as I literally knocked on almost everyone’s door. I did a fair bit of work experience & trainee model making where I learned quite a bit about studio practise.

I guess I did the classic of casting my net wide and after 1 and a half years I finally made a catch! I was asked to come for an animation audition for Ealing Animation in London. I think I got the job for two reasons - I would work very hard to impress and I was cheap!

One of Tim's first jobs in animation came with the BBC's
fondly remembered stop-motion education show 'El Nombre'

It was a low budget educational programme called El Nombre and so long as we told the educational part properly we had some creative freedom within the rest of the episode. For months, my animation was mostly long drawn out shots of gerbils counting money, very slowly. Fortunately the characters were charming and I had some very interesting and challenging sequences to work on for the action parts of the story. I was one of only two animators on the show so had my fair share of variety and tricky animation. A junior animator wouldn’t normally get the difficult stuff, but they only had two of us to delegate to! After 8 months the series finished & I was looking for work again, but this time I had some half decent shots under my belt & could pretend I was a professional!

- How did your involvement with Tim Burton begin? Were you a fan of his work before you were recruited for Corpse Bride?

I’ve always had a huge appreciation for Nightmare Before Christmas as it was the project that inspired me into this business. I loved Tim’s visual style and to work on a giant set from a Nightmare or Corpse Bride movie felt like the ultimate career moment at that time. Back then the only place that made feature films was Aardman. They already had a full time animation crew in place, which left most other animators around the UK (myself included) working on children’s TV series. This meant that when Corpse Bride came along it was a big deal – a chance to work on a big Hollywood size Tim Burton movie! I’d now been animating children’s series for 6 years and this movie felt like the opportunity of a lifetime!

However my showreel was rejected, as was my second attempt and only 6 months later did my third showreel (I kept working on it and updating it) earn me an audition. I had to do a nerve-racking 3 day test, but this time around, I made the right impression. It didn’t end there of course as you need to continue earning the directors trust for him to delegate what sequences you get to animate.

- Can you describe what an average day is like for an animator? Do you specialise in one particular area of it or is there a lot of variety?

On a film you often get typecast and could spend most of your time with a handful of characters. On Corpse Bride I was mostly cast as Barkis the sinister psychopath for 6 months. On Magic Piano I developed how to animate the Flying Machine & spent a good 6 months pushing it to the limits! On children’s series & commercials you can get a lot of variety quickly which is great for learning your craft.

An average day? It always depends on the project and the company you’re working for. Each studio has slightly different working practices so I could answer differently for each production. Here’s a generalisation:

Tim worked extensively on bringing the villainous
Barkis Bittern to life in Corpse Bride

As an animator my role tends to function like that of an actor in a live action film and I must be cast for the role. This is all based on what the director needs and I will work to his/her instructions to try and find the best way to approach the shot. From here I’ll plan the shot out with the camera crew to ensure I’ll be keeping the puppet in focus and making good use of the lighting. Next the model/puppet makers and riggers will help me with any details so that I can create the shot as close to the director’s needs as possible.

A quick note about time keeping: There’s normally pressure to get things done as quickly as possible (for understandable financial reasons!). In fact the key to making beautiful stop motion fast is all in the preparation time. It’s like struggling through an obstacle course when you’d be better off removing the obstacles and just sprinting to the finish line. You’ve got to take responsible decisions to get the balance right.

Once I start animating, you’re kind of on your own – for many many hours until the work is complete. You have to embrace & love the creative freedom to ‘perform’ your shot as a live action actor would. You have specific instructions that you need to get right but at the end of the day you’ll be relying heavily on your instincts. In truth you’re normally under pressure to get it done as quickly as possible!

- Could you tell us a little about your involvement with BreakThru Films? How was it working with Suzie on Peter and the Wolf?

I came onboard Peter & the Wolf about 2 months into the shoot and it was quite an exciting time in those early stages. I was the first animator to come over from outside Poland for the project. Suzie was great and had such a clear vision of how every detail should be. The challenge for me was being able to give her the detailed performance she needed in the limited time we had.

Initially Suzie was hoping I could do lots of work establishing the wolf, but the puppet wasn’t quite ready and I started working with Peter. She liked my close up acting work and basically I think most of my time was spent doing close-ups of Peter face. It was tricky as only the eyeballs could move and Suzie needed very specific emotional reactions from a completely static face! The shot that stands out in my memory is where Peter sees Duck, his childhood pet and closest companion, eaten alive right in front of him. Suzie asked for Peter to display utter shock, then overwhelming horror, followed by a shiver creeping up his spine, climaxing into trembling realisation. All this when the only facial movement I can get is moving the head and eyeballs!

- And what are your thoughts on The Flying Machine?

Oh quite simply it’s the most challenging project I’ve ever worked on! It wasn’t just because I was animation supervisor this time round, though certainly that in itself was an interesting new challenge. It wasn’t just that it was my first time shooting in 3D or that every action had to naturally sync with Chopin’s music. No the film had so many unbelievably ambitious but potentially beautiful sequences. To try and coordinate shots with thousands of flowers blowing in the wind, or epic long shots or the entire junk yard coming to life was complexity on a grand scale - and I didn’t even animate those pieces myself!

Most of my time in the studio was taken up trying to get a 2 metre high flying machine puppet to soar through the sky convincingly. It was a fascinating yet intimidating character/machine/force of nature (we called it all these and more!). We had a lot of practical hurdles to overcome (I sense I’m making a gross understatement here!) and it was really tough getting such a big complicated model to do what I wanted. I sometimes get more satisfaction seeing the shots before post production than after, the only reason being that you can see all the rigs moving that control it. Then you get a very real sense of what a technical accomplishment it was.

But the real beauty of the film was that Director Martin Clapp had worked so hard to make these sequences flow to the music and tell some beautiful moments. Each shot was utterly complex, but you knew it was justified and would be worth it. I’m very very proud of all we did on Magic Piano and feel lucky to have been so heavily involved with it.

- You've most recently completed work on Burton's Frankenweenie, can you tell us a little about the animation approach in this new film?

The cloth will come off Tim's work on
Frankenweenie when it's released this October

Well I can’t give too much about the film away yet, but again I’m really excited to be a part of this gem of a movie. It may initially look similar visually to Corpse Bride, but the animation is much more dynamic and lively. It really tested your timing as an animator. I did a lot of work with central characters Victor and his pet dog Sparky. This meant animating a four legged character who had to behave like a loveable but realistic dog. I looked at live action videos of real dogs regularly to try and get Sparky’s running and mannerisms accurate.

- Do you think there's a bright future for stop-motion animation, and if so, what can explain it's continued appeal?

It looks like we’re starting a golden age of stop motion now. There’s going to be a lot of films coming out of America, as well as several European ones on the cards soon. After a dry spell for children’s series, there’s suddenly many happening in the UK simultaneously. Aardman continue to keep as busy as ever too. We could be looking at 6-10 years rife with stop motion productions.

As for the appeal, I guess it’s the age old tangible quality, that you feel you can touch it and you can see it’s not perfect. I think people find a model set and a puppet very immersive. You can literally walk on that set and more easily imagine being in that world. We all had toys or dolls we had a close attachment to as children & perhaps puppets tap into this primal bond with our imagination.

It’s been such a blast working with so many different talented people and I feel so Iucky I found an art form I love and can earn a living from. I even went to Ray Harryhausen’s house recently to discuss stop motion techniques with him – I mean how cool is that?! It is not an easy career and won’t suit most people but there can be a lot of highlights. I’m trying to settle down more but there’s a lot of stuff tempting me right now. I believe even BreakThru Films aren’t done with stop motion...!

Tim’s website: www.TimAllenAnimation.co.uk

Follow Tim’s adventures in the world of stop motion on Twitter: @TimAnimation

The Rebirth of Frankenweenie and Tim Burton's Stop-Motion Dreamscapes

With his full-fledged zombie dog remake on its way to cinemas, BreakThru Films examines Tim Burton's ongoing love affair with stop-motion animation.

The revivified Frankenweenie makes his
 way to the cinemas this October

It seems fitting for a director whose career is so shrouded in darkness and long creeping shadows that Tim Burton's first film is not merely lost in the mists of time, but may in fact exist only in myth. If Burton's own account in the 2006 book Burton on Burton, his film-making began with The Island of Dr. Agor, a stop-motion animation based on H.G. Wells similarly titled story of genetically modified body-horror The Island of Dr. Moreau, however many have speculated that the film is little more than an April Fools Day prank. Whether fragments eventually emerge or the myth is dispelled, one fact seems certain, that by the tender age of 11 Burton was already deeply interested in the art of animation, just as he had immersed himself in classic American B-movies, Japanese mega-monster extravaganzas as the peculiar camp of Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe films, with their lugubrious star Vincent Price. While he was dropping out of Burbank High School he was also expanding his knowledge of film-making, taking in the stop-motion masterpieces of Ray Harryhausen as well as traditional hand-drawn animation. On graduation, Burton proceeded to the California Institute of the Arts, where he was to make his first surviving animated short, the punningly titled Stalk of the Celery Monster.

Dark, disturbing and deliciously comic, Celery Monster
showcased Burton's emerging distinctive style

Though only images and fragments of the film remain extant, the influence of German expressionist cinema and Universal Pictures monster movies is clear in Burton's surreal aesthetic. Shadows leap in points, architecture and design has a touch of the European art nouveau and the characters are irrefutably ghoulish. Burton's film caused quite a stir, and soon caught the eye of Disney Animation Studios, who rapidly hired Burton as an apprentice animator. He cut his teeth at Disney creating story-boards and concept art for a number of their less successful early 80's animations, but it was with his first solo film, 1982's animated short Vincent that Burton was able to indulge his passion for gothic horror and his admiration for stop motion animation and its potential to realize the playful yet unsettling aesthetic of his pencil drawings. Though Celery Monster had been successful in capturing some of the scratchy, nightmarish intensity of Burton's drawing style, the slightly jerky, marionette-like quality of stop-motion, suggestive of the early days of silent cinema and the expressionist horrors of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu or Robert Weine's Cabinet of Dr. Caligari gave Vincent an instantly recognizable yet utterly fresh aesthetic.

Vincent is haunted by animated visions from Burton's
twisted imagination

Adapted from one of Burton's own poems, Vincent was originally intended as a children's book, however the director was afforded a modest budget to create the short film, and in many ways the aesthetic which he established in it would come to define much of his work through the 1980's and beyond. Though Burton's next film, the original live-action Frankenweenie was judged a money-wasting flop by Disney executives and led to Burton's firing, he was soon to return to a wilder visual style with the major cinematic hits Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice.

The original Frankenweenie has gained something of
a cult following despite a disastrous initial reception

Both of these mega-hits brought Burton back to the world of stop-motion animation, which they used to add an exaggerated Tex Avery-style strand of mayhem to the live action proceedings that surrounded them. In Beetlejuice, the central couple who find themselves suddenly thrust into the Other Side are trapped in their house by a monstrous plasticine sandworm, and at one point twist their faces into grotesque elastic monster-masks in order to perform their 'bio-exorcism'. The stop-motion effects in Beetlejuice contribute hugely to its success and its ability to maintain a light carnivalesque visual tone despite the themes of death, suicide and the bleak Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the afterlife.

The stop-motion sand worm strikes in Beetlejuice

The success of these two films, both critical and commercial, reinvigorated major studio interest in Burton, and he went on to direct two blockbuster Batman films and the surprise smash-hit Edward Scissorhands, an elegiac gothic romance which saw Burton's dark aesthetic clash brilliantly against the pastel and picket-fence world of American suburbia. It was in the writing and production of Disney's A Nightmare Before Christmas, however, that Burton would return to stop-motion animation in a film which was to become his trade-mark. Part Christmas-film, part Halloween-horror, part-musical and all rendered in exquisite stop-motion, Burton's film was practically a love-letter to the medium, and is often credited with sparking a major resurgence of interest in its potential for film-makers and advertisers. 

Henry Selick and Tim Burton with the set of
A Nightmare Before Christmas

The story of the King of Halloween's bungled attempts to try his hand at Santa's role, it involved the use of highly stylized puppets, performing against a backdrop composed of the twisted hills and spiked gratings of Burton's idiosyncratic drawing style. Burton chose this style of animation partially to reference the American favourite Rankin/Bass Productions, whose holiday specials included stop-motion renditions of classic stories such as The Little Drummer Boy. This gave the film a direct relevance to those audiences which had grown up watching these classic Christmas treats, and made Burton's subversion of Holiday iconography all the more delicious.

Still from Rankin/Bass's Little Drummer Boy, a far-cry from the
twisted world of Jack and Sally

A similar style of stop-motion animation was used in Burton's co-production James and the Giant Peach, where Burton's flair for the macabre was kept on a tighter leash, but which nevertheless displayed some masterful animation, particularly in the huge flock of seagulls straining to keep the peach afloat. James returned to the mixed-medium approach of Beetlejuice in its use of stop-motion to bring to life the more fantastical elements of the young boy's adventures once he has entered the peach, while his more prosaic life with Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker was presented with live action. It's a successful approach which acknowledges the slightly numinous quality of the form, its suggestion of a world of the imagination or the unconscious which exists at right-angles to prosaic reality.

There was a cameo for Jack Skellington in Burton's next
stop-motion animation, James and the Giant Peach

Though budgetary concerns scuppered Burton's ambition to realize the alien invaders of Mars Attacks! with stop-motion, he was soon to return to the form in a major way with the creation of dark fairy-tale Corpse Bride. A conscious successor to Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride took the same aesthetic and animation style and set it to a more serious and in many ways more adult tale of love and loss. Corpse Bride was also the first Burton film to feature Tim Allen, who has worked with BreakThru  on both The Magic Piano and The Flying Machine, on its animation team; he has recently returned to work with Burton on Frankenweenie.

Burton chose a more muted and cold aesthetic for Corpse Bride, demonstrating
the flexibility of stop-motion and its ability to achieve a variety of tones

Corpse Bride was a big hit for Burton, and though his subsequent films displayed a stronger reliance on computer generated animation techniques, the upcoming Frankenweenie is a clear indication that he still holds stop-motion in the very highest regard. Just over a week ago another exciting announcement indicated that Burton's next major project will also be of interest to fans of traditional animation, as the director indicated that he was looking forward to moving into pre-production on a new ghoulish stop-motion feature titled Night of the Living. Cheerfuly tweaking the conceit of George A Romero's zombie classic, this new film boasts a script from Burton's Dark Shadows collaborator Seth Grahame-Smith and is expected to go before the cameras in 2013.

As well as proving one of Hollywood's most bankable directors, with a slew of box-office smashes and oodles of critical acclaim to his credit, Tim Burton is also worthy of respect for his constant and vocal championing of the magic of stop-motion and other hand-animation techniques. Time-consuming, labour-intensive and often expensive, these could easily have fallen from fashion and from the radars of major studios had they not boasted such a credible and imaginative advocate.

- Stewart Pringle