New BAFTA nomination!

The Lost Book has been nominated for a second BAFTA Scotland award. This time it's a New Talent award, in the Interactive category. Nominations were announced last night at a do in the newly-opened (and rather swanky) Blytheswood Square Hotel in Glasgow.

One of the great pleasures of the nomination event was meeting the competition - the multi-talented May Miles Thomas of Elemental Films. May's something of a legend - she swept the board at the BAFTA Scotland New Talent awards back in 2000 with the UK's first digital feature film One Life Stand, which also won a Scottish Screen Outstanding Achievement Award.

May's 2009 interactive project is The Devil's Plantation:

The idea: to explore the Secret Geometry of Glasgow and find magic in ordinary places... Dear green place or derelict dystopia?

I'm planning to spend time this week properly exploring The Devil's Plantation as it looks fantastic - why don't you head over there and take a look?

Here're some fuzzy snapshots of the evening (my mobile phone camera isn't getting any better!). Left to right, there's me with May, Elemental Films' producer Owen with Lost Book sound designer Stephen, and me with Stephen.



This post can also be found on The Lost Book website: New BAFTA nomination!

Carry a Poem

I've been blogging about making the Carry a Poem animation for the past few weeks, but I realise I haven't embedded the film itself into this blog. So, here it is!



If you're in Edinburgh or Glasgow you'll also see it in libraries and schools, on buses, and on the BBC Big Screen in Edinburgh's Festival Square during February 2010.

Carry a Poem trailer #7 - post

The last stage in making a film is post-production. For the Carry a Poem animation, post was all about putting together different layers. We "rendered" each part of the animation separately and then composited them in post. (Rendering is the last stage in creating CGI animation footage and the one stage that the computers do for us. The computers take all the information we’ve given them, and generate one or more finished images for each frame of the animation.)

So, for example, each frame where the poetry cloud is pulsing through the headphones...



...is made up of four layers: the street background, the headphones, the poetry cloud, and the Carry a Poem logo:



It's even more complex at the points where the poetry cloud is transforming the street. This image...



... has two street backgrounds, not just one: one without the poetry murals, and one with. These are combined using a mask which shows the splats where the poetry cloud has hit the walls, so identifies the areas in which the murals should be revealed:



This creates a combined background onto which we add: the poetry cloud (in two layers because the number of particles in the cloud was too high for them all to be rendered together) plus the Carry a Poem logo (tiny, but still there):



As you can imagine, the biggest challenge in all this is keeping everything organised. Until all the layers are put together it's very hard to check the renders, so it's crucial that the whole process is planned and managed carefully. This involves lots of thinking things through at the beginning plus many diagrams charting what will go where.

It's worth all the hard work, though. The moment when everything comes together to produce a finished film is brilliant!

This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #7 - post

Carry a Poem trailer #6 - music

The music for the Carry a Poem trailer was composed by Adam Brewster, the other half of Binary Fable. I'm going to ask him a few questions about how he went about writing it.

Helen: You wrote the music after the animation was complete. Why's that?

Adam: So that I knew where the significant points needed to be in the music, and I was sure they wouldn't change.

Helen: Can you tell me a little about how you got started?

Adam: The first thing was to think of a tune (this usually happens in the shower, but in this case I woke up in the middle of the night with the tune in my head. I could still remember it in the morning, so I wrote it down). Then I embellished the tune in my mind and started to think about what instruments would give the effects I wanted.

After that, I sat down at the computer and worked out the timings. I needed to make sure that all the "hit points" in the action were matched by hit points in the music.

Helen: Did you have a particular style of music in mind, or did the style develop as you worked?

Adam: I felt very strongly that a dance/electronica piece would work best with the visuals.

Helen: The music's very catchy (my favourite characterisation was from reading champion Colm who described it as an "earworm"!). Was that one of your main aims?

Adam: No.

I'm glad it turned out that way, though!

Helen: Finally, tell me about that vocoder...

Adam: If you listen very carefully, there are moments when the music seems to be saying "carry a poem". This is, in fact, me, saying "carry a poem" - modulated through the synthesiser software to give a slightly ghostly, robotic singing effect (in a way that hasn't been heard since Mr Blue Sky...!).



This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #6 - music

Carry a Poem trailer #5 - animation

Although there aren't any characters in the Carry a Poem trailer, there were plenty of things to animate. The biggie was the poetry cloud - thousands of particles that needed to be wrangled into position. Then, the camera movements had to be created, the Carry a Poem logo had to dance down the street and the poetry-carrying objects needed some spin.

The animation technique we use here at Binary Fable is 3D CGI – three dimensional computer-generated imagery. We use software called 3DS Max to build and animate computer models. It allows "particle systems" to be created, which made the poetry cloud possible. A particle system lets the animator control a large number of objects at the same time – by setting up rules and then adding a bit of randomness – rather than animating each object separately. This is what the interface looks like:



Here’s a "rough" of the short teaser film. The rough shows all the animation, but the visuals don’t yet look polished. It’s important to agree an animation freeze based on the rough so that work on the soundtrack can begin. The composer and sound designer need to know that the timings of the action aren’t going to change.



This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #5 - animation

Carry a Poem trailer #4 - storyboards

Late November 2009: we had a street design, we had poetry selections, we’d started the mural designs. Next up: we needed storyboards. We needed to work out what story we were telling, and how we were going to use the visuals to tell it.

We put together a very rough computer model of the street and used that as the basis for the storyboards. Everything apart from the buildings – the poem-carrying objects and the poetry cloud – was drawn on afterwards. We created picture tubes for the letters and paint splodges so that we could draw the cloud directly.



The storyboards are our chance to explore camera angles and get a feel for the action. They're also a great way of communicating our ideas to the rest of the team. Click on the thumbnails to see the full PDF storyboards.



This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #4 - storyboards

Carry a Poem trailer #3 - concept art

Previous instalment: Making the animated trailer #2 - the pitch

Once we'd pitched our idea to City of Literature things started to happen very fast. The first task was to create a project programme, so everyone knew what needed to happen when. We had nine weeks to complete the trailer – including the Christmas break!

Next job: try not to panic.

Next: design. We needed a street that would be Edinburgh-esque, but it couldn't be a real street. We wanted to have more different buildings (a school, a library, a bank, some shops, some houses) than you'd normally get in a single road. Adam's first sketch (in ballpoint on the back of a printout) made us realise we also needed to play around with the scale – Edinburgh’s wide streets and tall buildings wouldn't quite work:



After much thought and drawing, Adam produced concept artwork to go to City of Literature for approval:



The response was joyful but thoughtful – the sketches kicked off a huge discussion about which poems should be included. Were we allowed to include swearwords? (The eventual decision: no). What tone was needed – inspiration or angst? Should the poems be familiar or new?

Three cheers for the Scottish Poetry Library, and Peggy in particular, who took on the poetry selection and came up with a list of extracts that everyone was happy with... which meant that we could start having a lot of fun designing the murals!



This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #3 - concept art

Carry a Poem trailer #2 - the pitch

In early November 2009 we received the first Carry a Poem sketches by illustrator Emily Isles – showing the logo design, sample page layouts, and a series of Emily’s lovely illustrations. The branding came across very clearly, so we could see exactly what we needed to work with. We had two days to come up with a concept to pitch.

The illustrations immediately started us thinking about a hand-drawn look and feel to the animation, with plenty of white space. The letters and paint splodges (which we started calling the poetry cloud) looked dynamic, so we could imagine them floating around, and maybe spelling out poems... wouldn’t that be pretty?



And, there was the problem. Prettiness wasn’t what we needed. The brief had identified that the animation needed to be playful and a bit subversive. We needed to break away from the obvious.

We agonised.

Adam and I had some very robust discussions. Well, arguments. We couldn’t come up with the right approach, and we had very different ideas.

We agonised some more.

Then... Eureka!

We started thinking about urban art as a visually rich way of presenting words. Supposing, we thought to ourselves, someone carried a poem down the street but the poetry broke out in letters and paint splodges – where would that poetry cloud go? Could it splash the walls and leave murals behind?

We liked the idea of creating a literal interpretation of the effect of someone carrying a poem – showing that it could change the world around them. We also thought it would look great to take the poetry cloud from the book illustrations and put it into the real world.

Our pitch to the City of Literature went down well. We all got terribly excited about places that could be transformed, ways of carrying poems, and poetry that would make great murals. Next step: concept art and poetry selection.

This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #2 - the pitch

Carry a Poem trailer #1 - the brief

Here at Binary Fable we started thinking about the Carry a Poem animation back in October 2009, when Ali and Anna at EUCL first briefed us. My scrawly notes highlight that the trailer should promote the campaign and should get the poem-carrying message across.



One of the big issues we talked about was branding – learning from last year's reading campaign, we were all keen to make sure that the branding of every element of Carry a Poem was consistent.

The other big issue was the target audience. The trailer is aimed at a secondary school audience and we talked a lot about how to engage young people with poetry. I wrote down words like "fun", "playful", "subversive = good" and "undermine po-faced-ness"!

This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #1 - the brief

Carry a Poem viral

We've nearly finished the Carry a Poem animation. In the meantime, here's a sneaky preview: