Animator's App.

With Neil Boyle's permission I'm re-posting his recent post about the just released “THE ANIMATOR’S SURVIVAL KIT” iPad app. His original post can be found HERE.

Animator's App. 

One of the most professionally rewarding - and happiest - two years I ever spent was working with legendary director/animator Richard Williams, and producer Mo Sutton, on 'The Animator's Survival Kit - Animated' DVD series, originally released in 2008.

When I started work on this project I had already worked with Dick Williams on commercials, and two feature films: Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Thief and the Cobbler; but more than any work I'd done before, these DVDs changed my approach to animation, and made me feel for the first time that I had a much stronger technical control over what I wanted to achieve in a scene. Animating actually became fun - a pleasurable challenge - rather than an endless, gut-twisting, sweat.

Building upon Dick's original book, we animated over 400 examples of the animator's craft, incuding timing and spacing, walks, runs, flexibility, overlapping action, weight, dialogue, and directing. Dick Williams and Mo Sutton have now taken 100 of these animated teaching examples and converted them for use as an App for the iPad. Also included in the App is a complete copy of the Expanded Edition of the Animator's Survival Kit book, and Dick's previously unreleased 9 minute animated film 'Circus Drawings'.

Sounds like a great package to me!

For more information on the App click HERE.

And here's a review on Anination Scoop.

Permanent exhibition on the life and art of Errol Le Cain

posting for Denyse:

Hello Everyone
The Eurasian Association of Singapore is considering a permanent exhibition on the life and art of Errol Le Cain, who was Eurasian and from Singapore. I am writing his biography.
Very grateful to anyone who would please take the time to write to me at errollecainlegacy@gmail.com with ANY information, anecdotes and comments on working with Errol, his art and any information at all that could add to the biography.
Richard Williams has kindly consented to answer some questions and to write a paragraph or two.
Thanks and Health to all
Denyse Tessensohn
Singapore

Into the City (updated)

Here is a guest blog entry by our friend Simon Maddocks, in his own words and with illustrations he supplied. Enjoy!


UPDATE - Simon's linetests:

I started work at Richard Williams Studio in the summer of 1990, originally employed as Ramon Guillaumet's assistant. On my first day however, Dick gave me a scene to animate on the War Machine destruction sequence. The second and final scene I animated was the animation of the city from a long shot of the palace to a close-up of the three gold balls. This lasted about 194 frames, and took me a year. I've dug out a few drawings from the scene below:

Prior to the city scene were scenes of swirling clouds and other abstract patters within a glass ball held between a disembodied pair of hands. This is a layout drawing guide to the framing of those scenes.

The city in which much of "The Thief" takes place was depicted in many backgrounds in the film, and among the most spectacular was a large painting by Errol Le Cain of the whole city on a hill. The palace in its grounds surrounded by a moat is seen here in this detail. The whole painting was probably about 6 feet wide.

The design for the city was drawn up by Roy Naisbitt as a huge line drawing about 10 feet wide. I was concerned with animating the palace section at the top which was to be at the end of a track in to that section from a wide shot of the whole city.
I stared at this drawing for hours on my first day on the scene, wondering how on earth I was going to start the process. The style of the film was that of Persian miniatures, which had naive perspective which did not really lend itself to the kind of dimensional breakdown that would make animating around the form easy, but I noticed - to my relief - that Roy had actually used perspective on the palace, and the towers around the walls were actually definable on a perspective grid. There was no vertical perspective, all the vertical lines were parallel.


This is an early drawing to try to break down that structure before getting into some detailed grid animation on which I would construct the city. The underpinning of the grid would stop the buildings losing form and swimming around as the animation progressed.

With some basic grids drawn up I started on some rough keyframe drawings as a test of the process and also the composition.{


This is one of five or six layers of gound level where the grid is sub-divided and the plans of the buildings are then drawn in. The reason for using subdivideable grids almost everywhere is that you don't need any measurement, which is impractical in a perspective drawing. The subdivision works naturally within the perspective and allows smooth animation based on only a few initial points being laid down. Of course you have to get those right!


This drawing shows the plans of the buildings and walls for the various ground levels for one of the animation frames.

From the plans the heights of the buildings are "extruded" upwards to act as a template for the more detailed drawings.

This is the finished drawing of the main details of the architecture and landscape for the first frame. Further detail would be added on additional cell layers for bricks and smaller details, such as the chains supporting the leaning minaret.


As I had done with the city, the palace needed to be broken down into a constructable set of shapes. The palace was the most detailed building in the scene by far and was to fill the screen, so it needed particularly fine detailing.

This is a test drawing for the detailed lines of the palace for frame 103.

The finish of the artwork was another issue that required much care, detail and sheer craftsmanship. Under Dick's direction, it was decided that the city would be photocopied onto yellow paper, which would then feature coloured pencil rendering with additional layers of hand traced detail such as bricks and highlights on frosted cells. This picture is of a colour test by Dee Morgan. Dee had also worked on the flower renders in the film. Rendering in this sense refers to the subtle coloured pencil shading of the animation frame by frame. This is extremely demanding work because the tendency is for the randomness of the shaded pencil strokes to "boil" from one frame to the next, distracting from the more subtle main animation.

This is a demonstration frame I made up with laser copied city drawing rendered by Dee, with further detail and rendering work on a frosted overlay cell. There is also a flat painted cell for the sky. This is by no means the finished look as there would have been additional exposures to highlight the sky brightness and the gold domes. The cells no longer perfectly align in this artwork unfortunately but I hope it gives some indication where the scene was heading. The disc is about 11.4 inches in diameter


This is a test render of the final frame, centred on the gold balls at the top of the minaret, which were a key plot device in the story. Subsequent scenes in the prologue took over from this frame.The scene was called "Into City". I did the principal animation but others contributed, including Elaine Koo ( in-betweening ), Mark Naisbitt ( detail work ), Robert Somerville, ( in-betweens, detail ), and Dee Morgan ( rendering )Sadly this scene was never finished. The studio had a break for Easter in 1992, and when we came back 12 of the drawings from the middle of the scene had gone missing. These were near-finished highly rendered drawings from Dee that would have taken a long time to replicate. Shortly after that the film fell into the hands of the Completion Bond Company and all artwork was shipped off to the States. No-one picked the scene up again.Working on "The Thief" was very hard work but it was extremely rewarding. Seeing the rough cuts as the film came together was inspiring. It seems rare now to see the close collaboration the team all had directly with Dick Williams, you didn't have to go through a chain of leads and supervisors to communicate with the director you just walked up to him. I learned a lot on that production and made a lot of friends, who I am still in touch with. There's a wide range of opinion concerning the fate of "The Thief". I believe had we been allowed to finish it it would have certainly been an artistic success and probably a popular one too. We'll never know.

Script research

In reply to the last post Luke Menichelli writes:
"Though it's the donkey in this script, I remember reading an account from someone there (can't remember who) that the sequence involved the Thief with brightly colored wolves.

Garrett Gilchrist noted this from the early Nasrudin script:

THE MAJESTIC FOOL

WOLVES (Sequence 11)

Cut in to reveal six long-headed wolves posing as a tree, They zip in and run over to another pole, a little closer to Nasrudin, and pose again as a tree.
A snow storm hits and as it clears, we cut to Nasrudin asleep, with snow covering his body, looking like a white coffin, the donkey still sits, bored, at his feet,
Cut to the wolf-tree entirely covered in ice. The ice cracks and the icicles drop off, revealing the wolves who have turned blue from the cold. They shiver terribly and run to another tree.
Cut to the donkey whose ear lifts and whose eyes open wide,
Cut to the woIves who run to another tree.
Cut to the donkey, more worried.
Cut to the wolves sticking out from behind a tree, all six of them clutching at their stomachs - they are obvious1y starving to death. They zip back in and go down the hill from tree to tree, like a slalom,
Cut to the donkey, now very worried, Iooking round stupidly.

Cut to the wolves who shoot out from behind the tree, do a long run and zoom into the air.
We hear the sound of a screaming jet engine and they land on the donkey, who disappears in a cartoon bIurr.
Jet and buzz-saw and eating noises as the blurr zooms around,


Cut to Nasrudin with one eye open looking at the demotion of his donkey, entirely calmly, he leans to us and says.

NASRUDlN:
Such is life! One thing is conditional upon another.

Cut to the wolves, now with huge, full bellies, who burp and snicker, pick their teeth and laugh gleefully to each other in
front of Nasrudin, rubbing their bellies with delight."

The Dying Messenger, Part 2

Here is part 2 of the interview with Tash. This is the 2nd Dying Messenger scene. It's animated in slow motion to suggest that it's part of King Nod's dream.Holger:
I remember seeing this second scene of yours at the linetester, at normal speed initially. It might have been one of the times where Dick liked a test so much that he called everybody over to check it out. I remember Dick telling you to just throw tons of inbetweens in there to create the slow-motion. Did that work out or did you have to adjust things a bit?

Tash:
I had to adjust things and I knew that would be the case when I started out. There are always a lot of small, wonderful things that happen that the eye misses in normal speed. Animation on twos naturally glosses over a lot for fluidity; if you want to incorporate some of them, you ought to switch to ones. When you go deeper into fractions of seconds, you find more. Think about all the slow motion live action scenes you have seen. At the time I had in mind some slow motion horse racing scenes from a film with a boy and a horse; I believe it was The Black Stallion.
When the scene reached its ideal slo-mo look, Mr. Williams wanted one more set of inbetweens packed in- to make the whole thing on ones. Slow though it was, Mr. Williams still wanted animation on ones. The hairline inbetweens were indeed carried out. (This scene) was actually assisted by someone else (not Sharon), a girl who came just before I left; I believe she was from Berlin.

Holger:
On all the scenes I like the overlap on the flag pole and arrows. I remember seeing on some of the drawings faint traces of rubbed down straight versions. Did you animate them rigid on a first pass pose-to-pose, perhaps and then the bending for overlap in a second pass straight-ahead, referencing the rigid version?

Tash:
I don't remember the details now but I probably would have sketched in the flag in its actual size and shape, taking into account the perspective and all. This would be a precaution against the flag progressively growing, a common trap in flag waves and similar secondary action cloth animation when it is done straight ahead. As for the arrows, they were especially difficult to keep track of because they overlapped a lot in perspective. I kept track of them by giving each a different color.


Holger:
Did you inherit the BG pan for this 3rd Messenger scene from Babbitt's earlier version?

Tash:
Inherit I did, but my version was done from scratch.

Holger:
Did you animate the horse on the spot on the same pegs or did you work locked to the BG, switching pegs every few drawings?

Tash:
Now this is a scene that doesn't satisfy me that much in its final version: I made the original animation in place and it looked fine. I figured since it is a gallop, the hoof contacts would be so short that it wouldn't be difficult to create a matching pan. What I failed to calculate was perspective- or rather, the absence of it. I have the horse galloping right up to the camera and then away again, seen almost from the back. It would have worked if there was no texture on the ground, or at least something moving in perspective. But the background had to look flat, with these rectangular tiles or whatever they are on the ground. Ironically, this flat oriental style that looks so exotic to Western eyes has always left me, a native of the near orient, cold! I started experimenting by making sketches with patterns of squares in varying sizes, and panning at varying speeds, trying to come up with the ideal combination that would keep the hoof on the spot it landed and not slip. The closer that animal comes, the faster the whole background has to move you see. Then Roy Naisbitt came to me and told me Mr. Williams didn't favor animation "in place" since it meant having the pan locked in, he preferred it done "with the pan" so that he would have the freedom to adjust the pan speed himself. Mr. Naisbitt took my animation and re-pegged it over a compromised background and the result of this re-pegging you can see on screen; the effort to keep the hooves steady has resulted in some jitter and some loss of fluidity.

Holger:
Let's talk about the scenes in the Throne Room. Did you work on the reflections at all (maybe just on some key poses?) or did you leave that completely to Sharon, perhaps?Tash:
Well, after the (first) scene was done, I was told the whole scene was to be played on a polished floor, and the reflections would have to be put in. I remember suggesting putting a carpet under the horse and rider to hide the hoof and foot contacts; then it would have been a simple matter to flip the drawings and the illusion would be fine. However, Mr. Williams did not want to go for that solution. It was to be polished floor all the way through!
This meant drawing the underside of the horse and all, or else the foot and hoof contacts wouldn't work- not to mention the full body contact when the horse collapses! This was one place in this no-perspective film where we couldn't evade the demands of the law of perspective! I started working on it- it was just before I left- and I believe Sharon was to take over and continue, but when I saw the finished version of the scene, surprise surprise... the carpet! So I figured maybe they did just flip the drawings after all!


Holger:
I really like these closer scenes with dialogue. Together with the first 2 scenes these are my favourites. It would be nice if you could tell me s.th. about your work on them.
Tash:
These scenes were my only real lip-synch scenes on the film; pity, because I enjoy lip-synch. I get a kick out of seeing my drawings actually talk! The messenger only grunts and moans in the other scenes, here I actually got to animate him saying something. Again, as in the other scenes, the challenge was to make a very slow-paced scene interesting. If you listen to the track alone, it's depressing. Again the solution was to enrich the slow pace with a string of small details, hopefully interesting in themselves. I do regret putting in a stagger though, I did that because Mr. Williams did it in a lot of his scenes, and I thought I would take a page from his book, this being his movie after all! But in general I am satisfied with the scene, his weight when he falls forward and catches himself with his arm, the overlapping bits of his headgear. the discs on his costume that help give him volume, his suffering puppy-dog expression- these were all fun stuff to work with and if not actually fun to watch (he is dying after all!) I hope at least interesting to the viewer!
Holger:
I much appreciate you taking the time for this Tash. Thank you!

Tash:
You're welcome! Did Sahin also contribute to your blog? His story is most interesting! He had a difficult time having his own genius (I am using the word in all seriousness) accepted and appreciated by Mr. Williams, but he eventually held out longer than I.

Tahsin ("Tash")


I also asked Mark Williams about the Dying Messenger scenes. Here is some of what he wrote: "I don't remember too much. It was a while ago. I'm surprised that you have so many details in the blog already. I'm also surprised that other animators remember their shots so well. I think Dean Roberts and Gary Dunn did a lot of the background characters. Tim Watts some of the King and Zig Zag but what exactly I don't know.

The Dying Messenger, Part 1

All the Dying Messenger scenes were animated by Turkish animator Tahsin Özgür, aka Tash. Put together back to back they work like a little short film. I love the irony and black humor. Tash's animation stands out as some of the best work on the film. Very solid and convincing. When I talk to other animators about the Thief, something that a lot of people remember is the first scene of the Dying Messenger climbing onto the horse. All images shown in this post are from this scene. Tash confirmed that this was the first scene he animated when he started working for Dick Williams in 1990. I'm very happy that Tash took the time to answer some questions via email about his work on the film.

Holger: I remember you half-jokingly saying that this scene would be your only contribution to the film. It's one of the longest scenes in the film, almost one minute long. This is very unusual for a hand drawn film. I think it's pure gold. The beginning was edited out after Dick lost the film to make room for whatever... it makes no sense to me. Fortunately you were able to do more scenes, all the Dying Messenger scenes if I remember correctly? 

Tash: Yes, but he (Williams) wasn't happy with my interpretation of the Sultan, so in the scenes where they appear together, I animated only the Messenger. And the horse, of course. I also passed on one dying warrior in the first long scene to my assistant, Sharon, who did a fine job of it (bottom left of screen). I also had an inbetweener, Mark, and I seem to remember he did a dying figure somewhere too. 

 Holger: I was impressed when you showed your first pass for this scene. You animated the horse with much more drama, more active - I think it even went up on it's 2 rear legs? Could you tell me a bit about how you worked with Dick to get from that initial approach to the final more contained animation style?

 Tash: Mr. Williams did not want a cartoon approach. Maybe Roger Rabbit had turned him off completely, who knows? But the pacing of his commercials have also been different from the usual "cartoony" approach. Whatever I did he would want me to reduce, pull back, slow down. The horse was supposed to be shell-shocked, that was his brief to me, but I wasn't allowed to express that with any kind of broad movement. So I had to keep the animation contained, and somehow be expressive at the same time.Holger: Dick sometimes felt frustrated when he realized that often he could not use Art's work to the same extend as Ken's work. Did Art animate an initial version for this scene? Were you able to use his work in any way or did you pretty much redo the scene? 

Tash: The scene had already been animated before by Art Babbitt but Mr. Williams was unhappy about it. I didn't get to see Art Babbitt's original version straight away, I had gone someway into the scene before I could and mine bears no resemblance to it. But I could see why Dick was unhappy with it. He wanted a long, drawn out, slow scene and Art gave it to him; the result was frightfully boring. I tried to make it interesting by filling it with small incidents and movements. The Messenger climbs over things, pushes aside a sword, then a leg, the horse reacts to him trying to get on, he in turn is affected by the movement of the horse. The long, slow scene became a string of tiny events that keeps it from getting dull. 

Holger: Did Dick give you layout drawings? Where they on-model? Or was it up to you to come up with the drawings for what he wanted happening in the scene? 

Tash: What I got was things that looked like blown up storyboard sketches- and I use the word "sketch" intentionally. They were very rough and gave a rudimentary idea of what the scenes would look like. I drew a Messenger that looks somewhat like the figure on the sketches, and for the details of the action I came up with things as I went along. Every time my Messenger came close to approaching his target, Mr. Williams wanted him to struggle more and spend more time. So I backtracked a lot to make him do whatever he was to do with more difficulty. 

Holger: The Messenger and the horse feel more 3-dimensional and solid than some of the other characters in the film. Did Dick design it that way or was it more the way you ended up drawing them that contributed to that? 

Tash: It is pretty much my approach to drawing that gave that look. There was no model for the horse, Mr. Williams just showed me some prints of Middle Eastern miniatures for reference. 

Holger: Did you work pose-to-pose, straight-ahead or both? 

Tash: Both, intermixing, and eventually having all drawings drawn rough and tested before passing it on to the assistants who clean it up. This is still my method.Holger: Didn't Dick advise you to look at Kurosawa's Ran? How did that influence your work on this scene? 

Tash: Yes, he gave me the cassette to watch. I was to try and lend the atmosphere of carnage and devastation that we see in the aftermath of the battle in that film. I was also meant to make the flags flutter in the Kurosawa way, and making a mad wind like that meant animating the horse's mane, tail, stirrups and a tassle in the same way. 

Holger: For most scenes in the film Dick liked to do some final clean drawings. Did he do that for your scenes? 

Tash: No. They went straight to my assistants. 

Holger: Dick often expected his animators do do their own cleanups. Your method was different. You had your little team, Sharon Smith and Mark Williams. Could you tell me a bit about your method and how you used their help? 

Tash: Generally I do all the rough animation, inbetweens included, before passing it on to assistants. I test it, correct and fine-tune it and then re-number and re-chart in its definitive form, try to create charts for parts that were done straight-ahead, indicate secondary action, overlapping action, and anything else that does not follow the chart. Then I pass it on to the assistants. That is how I worked with Sharon and Mark then. Sharon would clean up the keys and breakdowns, correcting forms and volumes, and Mark would do the clean inbetweens, referring to the roughs of course. Whether I ever asked them to fill in drawings that I did not already draw and test myself, I don't remember right now, but the proximity of their desks would have made that also practicable if at any time I found it necessary. 

Holger: I think you did some of the best work on the film and your approach is more than validated by the final result, but I'm curious about how you convinced Dick to let you work this way. How did you accomplish that? Was that discussed when you were hired or did you work that out while you animated your first scene? 

Tash: I don't really know how others worked, Mr. Williams and Ms. Sutton demanded a lot of overtime- 56 hours a week (that was a request given in writing, later increased) which is the equivalent of seven days a week. I opted to work away the hours during the week and save my weekends. I was just married then and that marriage would not have lasted long if I was gone seven days a week. The result was that I chained myself to my desk and did not socialize, working with full concentration the 11 plus hours (not including lunch) daily in order to be able to spend the weekends with my wife. So I never really knew how the others worked or whether my system was any different. Sorry, I did know how Sahin worked - I knew him from before, and we are friends as well as compatriots so we saw each other outside work as well. He had a small group from Bulgaria assisting him for a while. I don't remember having to persuade Mr. Williams about anything. I believe that was the set-up I walked into. My only condition was that I be allowed to bottom-peg and he, the convinced top-pegger, didn't mind.to be continued in "Part 2"!

Leaves

This is a little spin-off post from the recent Chase post. I was trying to find out who animated the leaves for this scene:What follows is a little back and forth email conversation I had with F/X animator Graham Bebbington about the technique used to create the shimmering leaves in this and two more scenes:

Graham:
I animated a few of the shimmering leaf scenes and may have had a hand in the one shown. Basically they were painted panning backgrounds with sections of animated leaves repeated to give the impression of movement.

Holger:
Could you explain that in more detail for the blog? I'd like to understand how that worked.

Graham:
Basically it involves animating leaves moving very slightly as if in a breeze from say left to right, fixed to the same spot on a painted tree BG. Then gradually layering the same drawings slightly offset until you are happy with the amount and feel of the animation. Then you can experiment with the colours to enhance the shimmering effect and if they need to react to something, i.e the Thief falling into the branches, you can have bigger movements and showers of leaves falling down from the branches to enhance the effect as secondary animation. Above all you need patience and attention to detail as it is the repetition and variety that creates the illusion of movement and any large movements would distract from the main focus. As Dick said at the time you should “feel the wind”.

Holger:
I talked to Dietmar about this. He told me about some scenes where he reused OneEyes in the same scene by using different pegs and offsetting the numbers in the x-sheet. Since you mentioned other leave scenes I had a quick look and found 2 more in the Polo game:
Graham:
WOW, you found two scenes I definitely did… you’ve made an old man very happy. (Just kidding!) Below should clarify it a bit more and added to the previous e-mail give you a better idea. Obviously being in the same room and drawing them for you would be the best way. But this is the next best thing.

Holger:
For example I don't understand how you would use different pegs if you just want to shift the drawing an inch or so. Floating pegbar, bottom pegs?

Graham:
OK--- I meant the Bg was painted over A, B and C pegs. With the leaves animated separately on paper as a cycle of 12, 16, 20 or? drawings … whatever works. In Dick’s case more… more… more!!!. Then once they worked they could be repositioned in paint and trace SEPARATE from the pegs BUT registered to the painted tree Background. The trick is to hide the join between the separate cycles of leaves and to start the cycle animation at a different number for each section. E.G. TREE One below start on frame 1 of cycle, TREE two below start on frame 3 of cycle etc.etc.
Holger:
When you said “then you can experiment with the colours” - that would be done in T&P? Would you linetest this by shading leaves in with colored pencils?Graham:
Yep, you guessed it. That was how I did the one in the rainbow scene above. Again animating sections and changing the start point of the cycle. (this time it was on smaller sections and it meant the tracing had to be pin point or the animation would jump)

Holger:
In this scene with the Thief I also can't find any obvious repetition:Graham:
I think this may have been animated as seen and used as a basis for the other ones, as the leaves are larger and would be harder to hide cycles in. Although the longer the cycle the easier it is. (i.e a 36 frame cycle would be more convincing than a 12 frame one)

Guest Blogger: Monika Kremer - Paint and Trace

It is really unbelievable, how much has changed since we worked on the thief.

I didn’t belong to the animaton crew, I worked as a painter in the paint and trace department.
It was my first and only experience at working on an animated movie.

I became interested in the film, because my husband Dietmar was one of the animators. Lacking the talent to draw or animate, but fascinated by the look and story, I applied for Paint and Trace and got the chance to work on the Thief. Thanks a lot to Maggie Brown, the head of Paint and Trace - it was an experience I will never forget.

In 1990 it was impossible for me to imagine that 15 years later it would need only a couple of people and some computer to do – not only our work, but the work of the camera department, too. We were about 20 painters and up to 15 tracers - and I always thought, we needed more. But soon the space that we had rented for the Paint and Trace department was filled to the last place with people and free-lancing painters were employed, too.

The tracers worked with special tracer pens. They traced the pencil drawings, which came from the animaton department, with their pens and in different colours onto the cels. For this they needed a lot of skill. I wasn’t able to do that at all and so I had the biggest respect for our tracers. Some very complicated drawings took over an hour to trace.

Nearly every drawing was traced; only bits from the war machine were photocopied. The brigands were animated on frosted cels with special pens by the animators. These cels were called “frosted” because they looked like a window covered in ice. This enabled the animators to draw straight onto them and a special spray was used afterwards to make the cels transparent and then being painted on the backside as usual.

We painters worked with several different sized brushes, depending of the size of the area that needed painting. We used uncounted litres of paint not to forget the many white cotton gloves to prevent fingerprints on the cels. I still left a lot on them.

With cels the size of up to 60 x 30 cm, it felt like painting walls at times. And if there were special effects like lights in a scene, there had to be a black matte and a counter-matte for every single cel where an effect was to be created in the camera department.

Just to give an example, Zig Zag’s rings had already fifteen colours. Today that is just a mouseclick, back then, every single ring needed to be painstakingly painted with brushes. Here is also a colour model of “Your average crowd scene”

And of course these colours were not all readymade available, most of them had to be mixed, some had to be adjusted to compensate for cel level jumps under the camera. This effect can still be witnessed in old TV animations. When a character was on a held cel and just an arm moved, this arm would be on a cel above the held character. And if you didn’t adjust the colour for the arm on the level above, that colour would look different, because the cels are never truly transparent.

Some paints weren’t easy to handle, The colour of the Thief’s robe on the inside had to be stirred very carefully, otherwise it dried with spots and stains. If that happened, the paint would have to be scratched off again and re-applied. Obviously, today’s computers save a lot of time and hassle here.

Sometimes it wasn’t easy to stay inside the trace lines. For example, there was a scene were the Thief had spiraly vines around the body and then makes them into springs on his feet, which were incredibly fuzzy to paint. No “Animate at 300% and reduce in compositing”. This I would have loved to paint only with a few mouseclicks.

After the cels were traced and painted, they went to the checking department before they could go to camera. It was always a nightmare if a mistake was discovered on a cel. If somebody mixed up the two colours on the hem on kings garment for example, it meant that the paint had to be scraped away and the cel painted again. When you work from 8 in the morning to 10 in the evening, a lapse of concentration like this could happen easily.

Finally an example that was mentioned in an earlier blog, how the animators loved to add incredibly small details to their scenes. The "Stainless Steel Solingen" blades in the War Machine:

Paul Dilworth, Part 2

Here is another guest post by Paul. "The Thief" reader Justin left a comment on Paul's first post: "Big thanks to you Paul for sharing your experience! Always been a huge admirer of the film and Errol's other work... So could you say more about the "bath" and the specific process/ materials you'd use to make one of the BG's?"
Here is Paul's reply: "A lot of Errol's backgrounds were in the film. I think he did the Lion Fountain sequence, a lot of the market stalls, the atmospheric distant hills, the city behind Yum Yum's beautifully rendered roses, and a lot of the War Machine. I never met him, so I don't know too much about his techniques, but I was told he often put his backgrounds in a bath. I tried this with the Zig Zag tower background which had a sort of milky sky. Dick wanted more stars in the sky and the city outside the window more "magical," and he gave me some Edmund Dulac photocopies from "The Arabian Nights" and "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam," as well as some photocopies of Persian miniatures. There was always a lot of reference to look at.
Anyway, I must have dipped the background in the bath half a dozen times,taking it out of the water, adding more blues and greys, and trying to feather out the "tide lines" with a soft brush. Gradually the sky became fuller and milkier, so I put the stars on and John made them twinkle under the camera.
We usually used gouache for the skies as the chalk in the gouache got rid of a lot of the streakiness that sometimes happens if you do a wash with watercolours. However, watercolour washes were used for lots of the really dark backgrounds and gently airbrushed on top to hide any streaks. Generally we tried not to use airbrushing. Some watercolours really stain the paper and you can get a really intense dark effect, e.g. for the Camp of the One Eyes and in the War Machine. Some people were naturally more suited to certain scenes and we each tended to get whole sequences of those scenes. Some of the skies were absolutely flat, some a vignette of two colours and some milky and cloudy. Sometimes spiralling Persian miniature clouds floated by. That looked great on a flat sky. When the grey Polo Scene sky met the peacock blue "beauteous evening" sky Dick stuck a rainbow effect in to hide the join. It worked perfectly.
Anyway, the idea of dipping the backgrounds into a bath was that some of the colours floated off and some remained on the paper (we used watercolour paper, not illustration board.) It made everything look richer, like an underpainting for an oil painting. For rocky scenes, (e.g. in Tack's cell,) you can get a good craggy effect by dabbing randomly with a paper towel after wetting the bg. Then put more colours on and keep doing it 'til it looks rocky. There was often a slight grainy effect of the waterclour on the paper which you often see in the Dulac illustrations. If we had used acrylic animation paints it wouldn't have had the same lightness with the paper being part of everything and adding atmosphere. I guess all this is kind of stating the obvious, but if this is in some way useful then so be it!
Anyway, it was areal privilege to have had the opportunity to work on The Thief. Absolutely."

Warmachine through King Nod's telescope

We received this very nice assembly of King Nod's P.O.V of the warmachine from Luke Menichelli and think it is definitely worth sharing.

Jane Wright, Part 1

I have been emailing with Jane Wright. I updated a few of the recent posts with some of the information she gave me. 4/2, 4/4, 4/14
I also pasted parts of her emails into this guest post:

Many amusing stories have been told of Dick's outbursts and I do smile when I hear them, but really, I only ever witnessed the more gracious side to his personality as a director. Working downstairs no doubt helped. After my very first scene (Thief splashing into moat) had been shown in rushes I passed Dick on the stairs later that morning. He was deep in conversation with two or three other VIPs - probably Roy, John L. and Peter (Bond), but as I'd only been at the studio a few weeks I wasn't sure who they all were, only who I was -- nobody. So I shuffled past them all with my head down. I was halfway down the stairs when Dick broke off from his conversation, turned round and said, "Great splash!" before continuing his discourse.

While it's probably true that he knew such comments could make you cancel your plans for the evening, sharpen your pencil and work until midnight instead, it's moments like that which stay with you forever. A lesser director might build you up with a trace of condescension, yet Dick had a way of drawing out the best in many people and making you feel your contribution was much greater than it actually was. That's a rare gift. Whether it was because I was so far down the food chain doing only effects, or whether it was because I was more keen than artistic, or whether it was just beginner's luck I can't say, but it's the highest part of a human being which steps aside and allows a far dimmer light to shine to its brightest potential for a brief moment.

I think I was about 9 years old when the scene was first animated by Ken Harris. I remember well the awe of seeing a dope sheet with the names: Ken/Dick/Jane in the 'animated by' tick box and knowing that the scene had remained boxed up all the way through my school and college years. I guess we've all got memories like that from The Thief....

You might want to track down John Cousen, if you haven't already, he animated all the witch's vapour effects. Graham Bebbington and Lynette Charters were the other two effects animators from the Forum days. Heather Tailby did a scene or two also. Lynette did most of the animation - sand dunes, clouds, etc. - in the opening sequence with the prophecy. And Julie Penman was everyone's hard-working assistant and carried so much of the workload with very little credit. When you have Julie assisting you, your workload is lifted off your back on angels' wings...

The bubbles... (see 4/14/2008 post)
Neil set the style for the outlines for the first 15 feet or so, then handed the sequence over with the brief that they should move more like breasts, adding with an oblique glance, "Those are Dick's words, not mine!"
Not sure I was up to the challenge and thinking this might be more of a bloke's job, I nevertheless finished the rest of the bubble animation, then set about experimenting with the reflections, distorting all those little tiles on the floor.

The bubbles on most of those Thief scenes were animated on three levels with the idea that when shot on different passes, the bubbles behind would still be seen through the bubbles in the foreground. They ended up being painted all on the same level as it would have been too expensive to paint and shoot with three levels, so a lot of that detail and also the depth was lost. After the first scene was approved on twos and I was told to put it on ones I saw at first only the size of the job - I think it was about 80 odd feet - that first scene where the Thief squeezes out of the hole. "He wants it on ones", I moaned when I got back downstairs, "It'll take forever." "Well, you're not going anywhere, are you?" John C. quipped in response. He was right, I wasn't going anywhere - not for a long time! I was of course thrilled when it was actually finished on ones (due in large part to Julie who handled much of the assisting for the sequence and also kept track of all the different levels and who was working on what). The experience taught me not to look at the whole mountain, just the next two or three steps ahead. In proportion to the rest of the film it wasn't a mountain anyway, just a small hillock, but it's still the longest and largest scene I've ever worked on.

The day the studio closed I was in Wales. Lynette called me in the morning with the sad news and I jumped straight into my car. Four or five hours later I was in Camden joining in with the lamentations and farewells of my comrades. Dick's first words to me were "Sorry we couldn't finish your bubbles on three separate levels." I was shocked because nothing was further from my mind. It was really quite humbling because he'd just lost his whole film and I wanted to say something to him that wouldn't sound completely lame, yet he magnanimously drew the attention away from himself and was really there for all of his crew. But then that was how he was on so many occasions that I recall.

I know a man's grace doesn't sell many tabloid newspapers and wouldn't raise a chuckle over a few pints in the pub, but it's a side to Dick that is very real and perhaps gets eclipsed by the more 'colourful' facets of his personality when stories are being told. Because of his kindness, his encouragement and the example he set as a hard worker rather than a delegator, the year and a half I spent working under his direction is right up there as a 'Jim'll Fix It' episode in my life. (Actually, it was John Cousen who fixed it for me to work there, but that's another story...)

Simon Maddocks Part 1

Simon Maddocks just sent these photos with comments.
(I added a few things). See also his update to our first post "The Opening Scene".

Richard Williams at the 1990 Christmas Party at St. Pancras Way.

Dietmar and Monika Kremer. Michael Schlingmann and Tanya Fenton
138 Royal College Street. Dick owned this building. The Forum was only leased for the duration of the main production. You can just make out that someone has put the word "END" on the door, so this is probably from around the end of the movie production in Camden.
F/X supervisor John Cousen holding a leg by the downstairs line tester in The Forum. I don't know why.
Bill the security guard with his chips.
Margaret Grieve and Dee Morgan.






Tessa Wolpe hands me my redundancy notice on 15th May 1992.






The Checking Department at St. Pancras Way. Atlanta Green on the right.
Sally Burden, who ran Trace And Paint after Maggie Brown left.

The last gathering in the pub after the takeover. Neil Boyle, John Cousen, editor Peter Bond and Paul Dilworth in The Eagle.

Richard Williams in The Eagle. Ian Cook "Films are ephemera"











Guan Chuan Chew ("Chew"). Chew and his wife were the studio accountants.
Sophie Leatherbarrow, F/X animator Lynette Charters and Roy Naisbitt.

Neil Boyle and producer Mo Sutton. Richard Williams and John Leatherbarrow.


Roy Naisbitt





















Jim Maguire in front of some of the scenes he looked after as librarian.

Ross Dearsley working on a war machine build scene I think.
Max Berry working on Fido animation, probably assisting or in-betweening for Dave Byers-Brown.
The Forum in Camden, where the animation, production and editorial sections of The Thief were housed in 1990 to 1992, on the first and third floors.
An in-progress drawing from the "Thief On Springs" sequence.
Desks on the first floor of The Forum, with the wall of scene boxes in the background.
A detail of some of the scene box labels.
Tim Watts and Robert Malherbe.