Supporting, developing and promoting the art forms of the moving image
Shorts Blog
21 February 10
Follow the Short Film and Short Animation nominees as they record their Film Awards experience.
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Congratulations to this year's winners:
- Short Film: James Bolton, Martina Amati for I Do Air
- Short Animation: Sally Arthur and Emma Lazenby for Mother of Many
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Monday 22 February I picked my mum up from the station and got a Taxi to the Hilton – picking up a gift bag on the way. Mum and I opened the contents when we arrived, looking out of our 18th-floor window with amazing views of London and a cup of tea. The bag was filled with treats for the rich and famous that appear out of this world to a low-budget film maker. The nominees party on Saturday at Asprey was unimaginably luxuriously and exquisite. Champagne and cocktails, celebrities and chocolates, beautiful jewelry and antiques everywhere. We spent the whole of Sunday getting ready – having hair and make-up done by experts. I borrowed a stunning £20000 necklace from Asprey but decided to wear my own dress rather than one of the beautiful designer dresses (much to Mums disappointment – repeating 'get the blue one' as she saw what a lady I could be). But I wanted to feel like me. My heart beat very hard and fast as soon as we got in the Royal Opera House and the champagne didn't calm me down. I had thought a little about a speech just in case - not wanting to forget to thank people if I actually won - but quite hoping not to have to use it. The idea terrified me.
My speech wasn’t on the telly – just my initial surprise as I looked out. Once I started to speak I relaxed and remembered to thank everybody I wanted to - being up there was much easier than you expect with so many happy faces watching. Everybody cheered for Sally Arthur (who is still very pregnant indeed). There was a HUGE amount of clapping for my mum for helping over 3000 into the world over 30 years, and very much clapping to all midwives everywhere for doing such an AMAZING job. I carried the BAFTA around for the rest of the evening till we were kicked out of the Grosvenor after 4 sometime. Mum went to bed at 2 but, with Sarah Cox and Candi Smith, – two people who helped me greatly to get into this situation – we made the most of the ridiculously stunning party . We drank large amounts of everything and danced with the BAFTA slung casually on the settee. I am so overwhelmed and excited and very shocked to have this very shiny and heavy mask. Thank you BAFTA, and THANK YOU all the many people who helped me so much over the last year. And all the best wishes in the world to Sally Arthur.
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It is now about 24 hrs before the Awards ceremony and I am going through my checklist: dinner jacket, bow tie, instructions for tying a bow tie, hankie, cufflinks. I think I’m prepared but I’m sure I’ve forgotten something vital. On Thursday I got excited as I collected my tickets and nominee gift bag from BAFTA. I picked up the huge box half my height (and weight) and stepped outside as it began to pour down. I walked for a couple of miles and, just when I couldn’t feel my arms anymore, a bus stopped right beside me. It was the number 14. You can’t get better than that, I thought. Tonight I’m heading to the Nominees Party. I finally get to meet my fellow nominees and am really looking forward to it. I admire their films a lot and feel privileged that ours is among them. It will be a cracking soiree I’m sure. But I must remember to drink a pint of water before I sleep. I think that’s imperative if I’m to be operational the next day. |
I am sat in bed with the sun coming in very brightly and birds whistling outside, writing a list of what to do today before I set off tomorrow for the Film Awards. I like it when days start like this. Since I came home from Scotland I have been too busy to fit in enough swims for my liking, with lots of meetings and interviews and work to do that I am not getting through. I watched the films in my category on Wednesday at a festival – Animated Exeter and it sunk in properly that I really going to be at the Awards. I’ve spent the last couple of days really giggling to myself and finding it hard to be calm. The competition is very impressive and it feels amazing to know Mother of Many is in there with a chance. It is a while since I have watched the film and seeing it at on the big screen at Exeter and speaking (publicly!) about it afterwards – I am so hugely proud of it. It is a film about midwifery and childbirth – with real noises we recorded of actual childbirth and baby heart beats. The film shows the stunning everyday work of the midwife and the unpredictability and intensity of birth. It feels quite crazy that Sally Arthur (producer) can’t come because she will be going through all this – I’m hoping it will be over before the awards begin. She has put her shoes away and hung up her dress. We are both really gutted that she won’t be there, but with a baby upside-down she needs to be close to home and the midwives she knows well. |
When Michael Rose, The Gruffalo's producer called me about our BAFTA nomination I was sound asleep (like my co-nominee Luke Snellin, I'd forgotten about that nominations were due). The conversation with Michael was accordingly short, and confused on my part. Completely stunned, I went straight back to bed, dozing happily for a few hours, doing my best to stretch out the wonderful moment. The creation of The Gruffalo was a demanding process and what has felt like living in a washing machine for the last two years, felt sweetly coherent for those few hours. I first met Michael in a cafe in France in 2003. I'd just finished film school and had decided to try and open a studio with a group of friends. Michael was weirdly knowledgeable about our student films and passionately talked about some book called The Gruffalo. I'll admit now - not yet having children in need of a quality bit of bedtime reading - that I'd never heard that strange name before. I didn't tell Michael back then, and I never have since. Well, now I have. I suspect that Michael didn't have much more to show than his absolute love for the book back then, but of the many people who faded in and out of my work life at that time, he was the one who stuck to me, coming back year after year, always talking about The Gruffalo. In 2007, Michael finally asked what my take on an adaptation of The Gruffalo would be (I'd been in love with the book for quite some time by then.) In response, back at our improvised little studio, my colleagues built a rough miniature set, a very makeshift camera rig (marvel at it below) and we shot a test sequence that indicated how our interpretation might look, trying to convince Michael that mixing physical model sets and CG-animated characters was a good way to explore both the "deep, dark, wood" and its cast. Michael liked the test and my two years in the washing machine began. In pondering what to think about these last two years (or write about in a blog like this) whilst lying in bed the other day – still exhausted – I remembered some of the key moments, scary as they have been. Around the time Michael entrusted me with the direction of the project my long time co-director joined a big US studio, which was a wrench, albeit one I understood and appreciated. But what felt like the end of something also coincided with the beginning of another and shortly afterwards, one of my students, Max Lang, started displaying a spooky interest in the picture book I was pondering over night after night... Life proved itself serendipitous, as soon after he became my co-director and climbed into the churning appliance alongside me. It was much more fun with him in there. Continue reading Jakob's post... |
I’m living in New York at the moment which is why the phone call from my producer Jacob, came at 4.30am. Receiving news like that, in the witching hour, required my poor brain to do a series of painfully swift emotional gear changes from deep anger at being woken, to utter bewilderment, and then swiftly on into some serious pajama-clad elation. I called my mother who, quite rightly doubting the veracity of the news, hung up to Google it. She confirmed a few moments later that “yes, I had indeed been nominated” and from then on, with the maternal seal of approval in place, the celebration could commence unabated. In the end, it was one of the better pre-dawn experience I’ve had. The nomination definitely made up for the filming which was a hellish experience. We shot for two weeks in February on the ice of Lake Huron, Canada. Really, in retrospect, it was a very stupid thing to do. My initial flippant rebuttal to pre-production naysayers of “How cold can Canada actually get?” turned out to be one in a long line of spectacularly naïve reasoning. Very cold turned out to be the answer, easily as cold as Dante’s 9th ring of hell, if not marginally colder. Grown men wept (not me), some fell through the ice (me), cameras and lens stop functioning as did, to all intents and purposes, people. Serious theological question were asked: Could an all-loving God allow a shoot like this to happen? Absolutely not. We shot under a page a day and worked brutal hours BUT the crew were splendid, warming their hearts with a hatred of me and whatever alcohol could be found on set. They kept at it long after most sane people would have called it quits. Only at the end of a 17 hour day did my camera assistant Billy politely inquire whether it was OK if he couldn’t feel his legs before promptly laying down on a table and being sick. My actor Bill Sage and the dog were also brilliant even when they definitely shouldn’t have been (method acting was embraced) and Jacob, my producer, kept the whole show on the road whilst managing a Captain Oates like decorum in the face of what looked certain to be an icy grave for all of us. In the end, the fact that it’s only a 13min long film makes the whole painful exercise feel somewhat absurd. I think it does what we set out to do in that it's not your usual short film. It was certainly an astonishing experience but if you’d told us, as we stood out in the darkness of a Canadian winter, that we’d get nominated for a BAFTA I think we would have thought it was some cruel, cruel joke. |
It was a wonderful surprise hearing that The Gruffalo had been nominated, and I still can’t quite believe I’m going to the Film Awards on Sunday! I took time out from film school in Germany to join Jakob Schuh as co-director on this film and the production has pretty much dominated our lives for the last two years. At the beginning, our biggest challenge was to adapt the book, into a 25-minute film. We spent almost nine months writing and storyboarding to find the best way to tell this unique story, whilst staying as true to Julia and Axel’s book as possible. We knew that a lot of the fun would come from the different characters and their specific reactions to each situation: What is the mouse thinking, while he is exploring the deep dark woods? What does he use as inspiration for Gruffalo? What kind of guys would fox, owl and snake be in real life? What is the relationship between the mouse and his “imaginary“ friend? …and so on. We tried to give an answer to all of these questions and to create characters that would exist beyond the screen. Seeing these characters actually coming to life was one of the nicest moments during the making of this film. Below are some examples of the work that was created during pre-production at Studio Soi (Copyright 2009 Orange Eyes Limited).
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I have just returned from holiday with a friend – we drove to Mull of Kintyre and I almost forgot about the Film Awards for two weeks. Relaxing in front of a big fire, walking, eating, swimming (in a spa) and singing the Wings song continuously in my brain till I felt crazy. Returning to Bristol I am slightly run off my feet – living and working hard but also thinking a lot about the BAFTA ceremony and party. I haven’t finished sorting out my costume for the night (though I have some amazing shoes). My hair has gone wild after all the Scottish wind/sun/rain/snow/hail. I have a busy week of meetings and work and a possible trip to Exeter and don’t know how I will be ready before Saturday (when I pick my mum up at kings cross). Sally Arthur (MoM producer) is now 38 weeks pregnant and has just found out her baby is breech (in an upside-down postition) which makes things complicated. She's trying to get the baby turned this week and is still hoping to come if the baby is back to the launch position and still on the inside. We both have everything crossed hoping she can make it at least as far as the red carpet. I am really really really excited, but also a huge bit nervous about the baby and the BAFTAs. |
Following on from my previous post, I thought I’d elaborate a bit more about how the Happy Duckling came into being. Taking place inside a ‘living pop-up book’, the film follows the antics of a reluctant young boy and the happy duck who trails him relentlessly. The story came to me out of the blue one day when my wife bought a small illustration featuring a man on a bike with a dog, a cat and a duck following him. It gave me an idea to create something about a duck "adopting" a boy (the way chicks think the first living thing they see is their mum). The finished film turned out very differently from these first creative sparks, but the basic premise of a duck relentlessly following a boy stuck. In order to create the "pop-up book" effect, we employed 3D technology in a slightly less obvious way than usual. Instead of using objects with volume and mass, the Duckling world is paper-thin. Our main challenge was to reproduce a convincing paper world with real paper properties and animation style that people would buy into. Everything from the landscapes to the characters’ movements had to follow strict internal rules to guarantee the authenticity of its look and feel. To assist this process we first created concept drawings which in turn were produced as cardboard models, and later on were recreated in a 3D software programme (Maya). We then added familiar paper engineering devices like pulling TABS and opening FLAPS to drive the story forward and surprise the audience along the way. Now, with just over a week to go until the big night, I'd better go and buy a suit and some proper shoes!
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My usual routine in the morning is to wake up early, check my emails, and write, sipping a strong coffee. On Thursday 21 February, I could’ve done with something a bit stronger. I stared at the email notifying me of the nominated short films for a good five minutes, then emailed the cast and crew in a sort of dream state. It was only around lunch time that it began to sink in that 14 had been nominated for a BAFTA - but then I’ve always considered myself a little slow on the uptake. We shot 14 over two days in one location in London, took a break of a month, and cut the picture in four days. The sound design took a further three weeks. My team was the same as on our last short film which was also nominated in 2007, with the addition of cinematographer and documentary filmmaker Line Nikita Blom who completely threw herself into the technically-challenging aspects of the film. We’d developed a short-hand way of communicating with one another which helped enormously and I believe put the actors at ease considering the subject matter. I couldn’t have asked for a better bunch of filmmakers. The only reason why I wasn’t flying on the buzz that first week was because I had to finish a draft of a script. But I figured I had three more weeks to enjoy the ride. And as I remember, it’s quite a ride. |
The morning I found out Mixtape had been nominated for a BAFTA was a strange one. First of all I really did not expect it, and I don’t mean that in the purposely modest or trite way that you think. I had actually forgotten about it. Seriously forgotten. I mean the film is two minutes long and I gave it to the BAFTA committee on a whim really, as a kind of ‘nothing to lose moment’. It’s very unlike me to not know when things are happening too, but for one reason or another when I woke up on the morning of 21 January, I had absolutely no idea the nominations were being announced or that Mixtape was there. In fact, what actually happened is my morning began with distress. I’m not sure if you know how it feels to wake up, to look at your phone and to see scores of texts, missed calls, tweets, emails, voicemails. Much more than usual, probably five or six times as many, come to think of it. The first thing that pops into your head is “Oh god, something’s happened,” then slowly it becomes, “Actually maybe I was supposed to be somewhere?” and then you start to wade through the messages. They start off with simple words like, “Wow! Congratulations!” by the sixth one it’s “Really amazing achievement, well done!!” I’m sitting in bed, pulling my hair out. Seriously, what the hell are they talking about?! And then, after a couple of minutes, I found it on Twitter. The last place I thought I’d find something useful. A tweet – “Congratulations Luke Snellin”. Except this time it had a link. I clicked it and was presented with a webpage. That’s when I realised. That’s when I knew we’d been nominated. It was a truly unbelievable feeling. Next I found a voicemail from BAFTA on my phone just to confirm. In retrospect, I can’t help thinking how something I have dreamt and fantasised about nearly all my adult life was delivered to me on a cold January morning from a voicemail on my mobile. When I was sure, I turned to my girlfriend Laure, and I said in a slightly stunned voice, some words I have always longed to say. “We’ve been BAFTA nominated”. She looked at me in shock and replied after a moment of silence. “Oh my god. I have to buy a dress.” |
The BAFTA nomination came as an absolute shock and still feels quite surreal. Being nominated along side the other two incredible films is a privilege. We made the Happy Duckling with a (almost) nonexistent budget of £400 and was of course hoping for it to do well, but this is beyond our wildest expectations. The film has had a very successful festival round so far, screening at over 60 festivals and winning several awards, but a BAFTA nomination is a different kind of recognition. The Happy Duckling was produced in just over nine months (the right time for any perfect, slightly over cooked, baby... or short film). My philosophy from the beginning was to shun a lengthy finance raising phase, so instead I took a break from my animation studio, ink.digital, and put together a team of students from two rival Dundee universities - Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) and Abertay university. I wrote and directed the film, with an original score by Mick Cooke of Belle and Sebastian, but the actual designs and animation was entirely produced by those incredibly talented students. As there was no money involved this is truly a product of passion and love. I really believe the audience recognise that and it's an important factor in the film's appeal. |
I've been working hard in animation since I graduated in 1998 but haven't made another film of my own until now. I worked in West Highland Animation in a remote area of Scotland making traditional 35mm films, then all over the place in London (mostly flashing for Nexus, Bermuda shorts and Sherbet). After this, I was a designer on Tiger Aspect's Charlie and Lola. Moving to Bristol in 2007 (where I am now a director for ArthurCox and Aardman) has proved to be a very good move for me. I applied for 4mations/digital short funding last year to make a film to celebrate midwifery, I was inspired by my mum who retired after 30 years delivering thousands of Babies. ArthurCox and my producer Sally Arthur supported me through this huge learning curve, making something of my own after so long. It all feels very worth while now with this totally unexpected and exciting BAFTA nomination. |
...On our first meeting with the book's author Julia Donaldson, she graciously performed the entire Gruffalo in her niece's small kitchen – playing all the different parts to perfection I might add. Julia's brilliant version of the namesake character made for a considerably scarier ten minutes than anything I would have imagined from the book and because we didn't want to change any of the original text, we built upon the energy of this rendition, deciding to try and construct most of the film entirely through storyboarding the performances. I remember the moment we first stuck the book's 15 spreads on a six meter pinboard, staring at the huge gaps we found in between the key moments and the reality of the task kicked in. I also remember pushing for René Aubry, one of my all time favourite musicians, to score the project, only to have him proclaim at our first meeting: "Music and images, it's a mystery to me!" Needless to say, that wasn't true at all and working with René turned out to be one of most pleasurable and rewarding experiences in the making of this film. I also remember the shocking news that all the completely unrealistic 'dream cast' we had brazenly put forward had actually agreed to take part in the making of this film. Each one of them turned out to be unbelievably generous, which made the months of animation that followed so much fun. Many little things leap out at me about this project, I remember our computerised Motion-Control built of Lego, the stench of the silicone casts of the trees in the workshop, our 3D-scanner built by a colleague's nuclear-physicist brother, I remember my girlfriend's uncanny patience with me, and I remember a lot of stuff I took for granted at the time, how our crew always gave us their absolute best and how much I had actually enjoyed the marathon of the project, exhausting though it was.. Lying in bed the other day, I found myself perhaps for the first time to be pretty relaxed whilst thinking about the whole experience. Then I remembered that I’ve got to hold it together and walk the red carpet on Sunday and now I’m hiding under the duvet... My insides are on a Spin Cycle... |
Short Film Nominees | Short Animation Nominees |
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