Letter to Brett

early storyboard drawing from "Germans in the Woods"

About a month back I had the opportunity to meet Brett Thompson, the energetic and extremely friendly president of ASIFA Atlanta. I was able to show Brett our film "Germans in the Woods" and began exchanging emails. Having just finished the film, it was a great opportunity to share about the process and try to make sense of it for myself.  In previous posts I've gone into detail about the design of the film but I hope this post will offer a broader view of the whole process:  please enjoy an edited version of that conversation.

Brett-

You ask how long did it take to animate, so let me describe our process.

We started with a piece of pre-edited sound (approximately a 2 minute clip cut from a 40 minute StoryCorps interview in which a World War II veteran recalls his "saddest memory"...read about the sound here). This piece had aired on NPR and was included in the recent StoryCorps book.  Like many of the SC pieces, this story brought me to tears.  There was incredibly strong emotion in the voice and yet we knew there had to be something we could add with animation. I started by listening to the piece on a loop for hours, trying to really get the rhythm of the sound and the emotion of the language stuck in my head. The recording began to break down into passages and I made thumbnails of possible shots to use.

 

storyboard roughs for the "Levitation Sequence": a discarded idea in which the dead soldier would be lifted by angels

When considering how to draw the characters I had to think how much should they look like the real people: what is essential to the story and emotion versus what is essential for historical accuracy. My brother went to the New York Public Library Picture Collection and brought back a stack of photos from the specific battle talked about in the story. Those photos inspired the tall and forbidding look of the forest, the thick blanket of snow, and the soldier's heavy face.

research photo of the Ardennes forest; finished background design

research photo, concept art, production still

I draw sort of cleanly, evenly shaped characters, and felt we needed to get backgrounds they would sit comfortably on that could also provide the rich texture missing in the character design. That led to designing backgrounds that had a kind of subtlety in value and texture yet were still abstract enough to act more as shapes supporting the composition of the movement. Looking at Willem Den Ouden's etchings of the Dutch countryside helped establish that look. The film's events took place in Belgium but the terrain is similar and the mood they set with enormous, dramatic clouds and gracefully passing light was just perfect.

etching by Willem Den Ouden

finished background design

"Germans In The Woods" was being visually designed constantly over the course of its creation, but the basic work for that was done in June, July and August 2007. I had never made a film before, so frequently I would make a speculative "production-still" in Photoshop and say, okay, that's what I'm doing, but really have no idea how to actually execute it.

In August, I did the majority of the animation, working furiously to do about two minutes worth of work and not always being sure exactly how the drawings would fit into the final shot. The speed I wanted was determined very early on: much of the film is in slow motion to match the drooping, warm voice and hold out the inevitable, painful conclusion in all its tragedy. Still, how I would ink and paint and combine the drawings with special effects and background was not yet settled.

Concept art, final image

Also in August, Tom Witte created the special effects animation of the snow and did some drawings of the forest. His sketches made me determined to get strong atmosphere into the film. A big part of achieving that was a series of ink-wash paintings created by my friend Iandry Randriamandroso. Iandry's paintings were commissioned with specific sequences in mind but were never used strictly as painted. Instead, they formed the foundation of Photoshop paintings I created by combining scans of flour, eraser bits and pencil shavings with his paintings on top of penciled layouts. This process was something that I had to experiment with and nailed about 6 weeks before the film was finished. We were playing with it right up to the end, constantly throwing out old backgrounds and trying new ones.

Iandry's painting

production still showing the above painting being used in a final background design

(Read more about the process of creating the backgrounds here, here, and here.)

In the end, we felt confident about what we had created.  The emotional toll some of the work took on me came as a bit of a surprise, especially the crying sequence in which the narrator talks about "waking up at night crying over this kid".  I tried to identify with the extraordinary emotional weight he was carrying and felt my own face and shoulders being stretched with his sadness.  This feeling was drawn out over the week it took to animate the sequence and was by far the most intense experience I had while making the film.

concept art and production still from crying sequence

Hopefully the emotional quality of the recording has been matched in the animation and the narrator's message, about the tragedy of this individual death, comes through in the film.

(Read more about animating the crying sequence and see a pencil test here.)

WWII Film Backgrounds

In this post, I want to describe our process for creating the backgrounds in our new film.  As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the look we wanted was that of Willem Den Ouden's dark, moody etchings.  Starting with my rough sketches, Iandry and Tom Witte created paintings and drawings for the various scenes.

drawings by Tom Witte

One of Iandry's paintings

Tom and Iandry nailed it, these were exactly what the film needed.  Tom added things like the mist in the trees, pushing me to get that kind of rich ambiance into the whole film.  Iandry's paintings are remarkable; he has that touch with the brush which comes from serious discipline and produces really rich images.

After those were done, I went back over them in Photoshop, building them up by layering the different drawings and paintings together with high resolution scans of granular substances like the pencil shavings, white flour and eraser bits you see here.

I've posted a few of the final backgrounds here.

I wanna send a big shoutout to Alex Fogarty, who taught me a lot about doing this stuff in Photoshop.  Alex was the lead designer who showed me the ropes at Little Airplane while we were working on "The Wonder Pets!"  She was extremely generous with me.

Willem Den Ouden and Iandry Randriamondroso

At one point, these images were what we showed our partners on the film as the final target.  I can see how the finished look of the film comes from them, but at the time I wasn't sure how to get there.  It was like saying "hey look, this is what we can do!", and then realizing you might actually have to figure out how to get there!  Hopefully we got at least halfway there.

  

The biggest influence for these were the etchings of Willem Den Ouden.  This Dutch artist has an amazing series of studies of what appear to be sky-landscapes.  For the presentation art, I used his prints as placement backgrounds in the images of the levitating soldier and the german looking out across the field.  Here are a few pure, unadulterated Den Ouden prints.

The other images feature dramatic washes by my friend, Iandry, who contributed to this film in a big way.  He can pretty much do it all.  It's just black ink on paper and he's made this very elusive, atmospheric effect that is just perfect.  These are just a few of the paintings he created.

I would be remiss not to show you at least one image by Iandry.  I am sure I will post many more in the future, but for now, here is one of my favorites, a linocut titled "Kalangita".