The Making of Watchmaker (photos) Many years ago in grade school I remember seeing my first Norman McLaren “scratch” animation, called Hen Hop. Norman McLaren worked at the National Film Board from 1941 to 1987 and established the NFB animation department. He was a pioneer in the art of handmade cinema, also known as camera-less or scratch animation, where the filmmaker draws, scratches or paints directly on the film. Over the years, McLaren’s technique percolated in my mind and eventually morphed into a concept for a project that utilizes the techniques of handmade cinema, but also uses live action, rotoscoping and visual layering to create a collage set to music. The opportunity to embark on the project recently presented itself when, at a concert with co-producers Megan Wennberg and Aram Kouyoumdjian, I mentioned the idea. They both thought the project would be fun and interesting, and we decided to see if we could get something going. We first looked for music that would be suitable for the proposal, which means rich and complex with lots of instruments and multiple melodic layers to complement the texture of the image. Megan thought of the Tom Fun Orchestra, who we approached, and they were immediately on-board with the idea. We started to put a package together for funding and after a couple of dead ends, Bravofact came through with 50% of our budget…enough to proceed with deferrals while we tried to raise more funding. The concept was to utilize live action footage as a base image, overexposing it to create white space on screen where the animation can be drawn in afterwards. The filmed images would also be hand coloured, traced, scratched or blocked out to create layers of imagery. The live action shoot was completed in early February with the nine members of The Tom Fun Orchestra performing against a 40x40 white backdrop. It was shot on an Arri 35III camera and I overexposed the film (Vision 500T 5218) by four to eight stops to make sure that anything that was bright went pure white, and to “thin” out skins tones and colours so that we could add that back later through hand colouring. This footage was processed, transferred to MiniDv and a picture edit was done by Kim McTaggart to the music track. From the offline edit, we did a negative cut and produced a 35mm answer print, which was our “raw” footage. Simultaneously, the soundtrack was transferred to 35mm magnetic stock. We also shot “movement guides”, which were shots of things like water flowing, waves crashing on shore, people running and jumping, fields of dots or lines on turntables, and trees rushing by out of car windows. This footage was processed and printed to 35mm film. While all this was going on, I started to set up the animation “studio” in my basement. I had found an old sketch of a machine that Norman McLaren designed for his films that enables you to draw on a frame and then project that image onto the next frame so you can see the progression of your animation. I commissioned Clark Biesele to re-create the machine from this rough sketch, which turned out to be quite an undertaking. After some fine machining and a month of playing around with lenses, prisms and apertures, the apparatus came together. We don’t really know what to call it, so we refer to it as the Biesele Prism Rotoscope. I also built a light table with a 35mm wide groove for use as a rotoscope, allowing us to lay down a movement guide (strip of film) and then place our overexposed “raw” footage on top. The motion guides (the rotation of the turntable, the body jumping through the air, or the movement of water) could either be traced directly or just used as a “real life” motion reference. The interesting thing about drawing directly on film is that the simplest of lines take on a wild vitality, because it is impossible to draw perfectly identical images from frame to frame. As a result, hard lines vibrate and colours pulse erratically. Pairing that insane motion with a slow or normal motion rotoscope creates a visual tension that throws the viewer off…you know it’s real, but it’s totally abstract at the same time. I also took some old Steenbeck spare parts and built a paint stand, which allowed us to paint on the film and then go through a series of rollers to dry before the take up reel. Finally, I put together an “old fashioned” edit bench with rewinds, synchronizers and a 35mm Steenbeck 6 plate editing table (anyone remember those)?). As soon as the sound arrived on 35mm magnetic stock, I started creating a “visual guide track” which involved running the mag stock through the Steenbeck or across the synchronizer sound head at various speeds. In sync with the mag stock was a piece of 35mm white leader on which I would mark out the melodies, beats, instruments, base notes, trumpet blasts, etc with various colour markers. When finished, you could literally see the music laid out on the white leader. When the final print of the “raw” footage came in from the lab, we put that in the synchronizer with the mag stock and the white leader and marked out and edge-numbered every foot. Now we had a frame-for-frame visual reference of what the music was doing so we could animate specifically to the soundtrack in sync. If a drumbeat happened at 245 feet plus 8 frames, we could animate a specific image on that frame of picture. Now we were able to start the animation! The goal of the project was to create a “visual roller-coaster ride for the senses”. In three minutes and forty seven seconds the viewer is assaulted with layers of colour, movement and sound, faster than they can possibly take it all in. The images are alternately synchronized or intentionally thrown out of sync with the music, and each layer of image is following something different on the music track. With that in mind, the animators did not have many restrictions…other than to always reference the music in some way. Due to delays that forced us to complete the animation phase within one month, the animation became somewhat of a community project. Eleven animators (the producers, as well as neighbours, friends, and artists) put in 322 hours of work colouring, scratching, blacking out, dyeing, rotoscoping, and hand drawing the film. The print was cut into several sections, allowing animators and colourists to rotate from bench to bench as the section demanded. Some sections of the film were put in 35mm stills film developing tanks overnight with Easter egg dye, which richly tinted the film. Some sections went through several passes of animation, rotoscoping and colouring to create the layers of imagery. There were no limits on ideas and lots of techniques were tried. I had done a number of tests before the animation process began, so we weren’t going “blindly” but had a good idea of what we were achieving. The primary drawing tools were technical pens, paintbrushes, Kodak emulsion dyes (originally designed for print and negative touch ups before Photoshop made it obsolete), India ink, sharpies, markers, stained glass paint and razor blades for scratching. Periodically, we would put the print on the Steenbeck with the 35mm mag track to see how the film was progressing. Cheers and whoops accompanied most of these viewings as we saw the animation come to life. Sometimes we got what we were expecting, occasionally we were disappointed, but mostly we were pleasantly surprised! After hours of splotching paint on 35mm wide frames while grooving to scores of CD’s, watching our labour literally come alive on the screen was incredibly rewarding. It could be disconcerting, however, watching the rotoscope you’d spent hours painstakingly plotting out, flash by in mere seconds. These viewings had to be somewhat rare because we were handling an increasingly valuable “original” which we were trying to keep from being scratched and marked by excessive handling. Once complete, the film was taken to Creative Post in Toronto for transfer to HDCAM SR in preparation for a Digital Intermediate finish. (I had originally wanted to stay analogue all the way to the end, but due to the fact that few projects are doing an optical finish, interneg stock has skyrocketed in price, making it cheaper to do a DI). The transfer was actually the first opportunity to see the final product. The brief screenings we’d had in the animation studio were discontinuous excerpts, viewed on a dark Steenbeck screen with a mono soundtrack, and we could never really watch the entire film properly. I was quite nervous because for months I had been espousing this concept and how great it would be, without anything I could really show…and this was the actual moment of truth. Thankfully, it looked pretty darned amazing! Almost all of the ideas that we tried in the animation were hugely successful and the dense layering is extremely hypnotic (even though at times I was worried it might be too much). The online suite at Creative has a 12-foot screen and a $30,000 projector, so the first “big-screen” experience was pretty mind-blowing…this is not a film for anyone who’s taken Acid lest it bring on a serious flashback. One or two of the staff at Creative Post dropped in to have a look at the film, and before long there was a big crowd and lots of comments: “that’s amazing”…”wow”…”cool”…“unbelievable”…”You painted EVERY frame?”. The first “public” screening was extremely triumphant to say the least. I had a big sigh of relief at the end of that day! The BetaSp version has been delivered to BRAVO!Fact and we are now continuing to look for more funding so that we can go on to the DI stage and make film prints for festival and theatrical screenings. Hopefully for everyone who sees it, Watchmaker will be the visual roller-coaster ride that it was designed to be, especially on a big screen! Principal Credits: |
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