Jolly Roger 1999
Jolly Roger is a short (12 minutes) animation film by
Mark Baker. It is a story of words and
deeds on the high seas, and revolves around three main characters, Captain
Jolly, Captain Roger and Estelle. There
is also a parrot that can mimic any voice or noise with the accuracy of a tape
recorder – and this causes problems, as almost the only dialogue in the film
consists of direct orders from one character to another.
Captain Jolly is pure evil. He commands his huge pirate ship with glee,
and is backed up by a crew of pirates that are like a swarm of angry
hornets. No ship is safe from them.
Captain Roger is an heroic coward. When he is certain that he is in absolutely
no danger, he relishes his role as pirate captain on his tiny ship, Nell. But at the first sign of any real danger, all
his energy is directed towards escape – or rather, all his energy is directed
towards shouting desperate orders to his one crew member, Hugo. Captain Roger and Hugo can be described as
scavenger pirates – they never attack a ship directly but they like to pick up
any flotsam left after the real pirates have left the scene.
Hugo, for his part is quite happy with his lot. His enormous physical size makes him almost
unaware of danger. He follows every
order to the letter and without .
Estelle, a captured French passenger, is made to walk
the plank by Captain Jolly. She is
incredibly strong willed and simply refuses to drown. Her one thought is for revenge at any cost.
The making of
Jolly Roger
The producer on Jolly Roger was Claire Jennings,
who is also the producer responsible for The Big Knights. Claire secured the funding for the film from
Channel Four Television, UK.
The script was adapted from ideas that were originally
part of an unrealised half hour project.
At this time Channel Four were interested in films of eleven minutes in
length, and the half hour idea was considered too expensive for a one-off
idea. So, I kept some of the characters,
came up with a completely different and much simpler story and started work on
Jolly Roger.
From the start I wanted the film to be full of
animation action and timing. I also
wanted to keep it very stark in terms of colour. Although I wanted the ships to have some sort
of texture, I liked the idea of a completely flat, deep blue for the sea. It also seemed important that there should
never be any land in sight. All the
characters’ shouts, demands, hopes and dreams rest on their little ships
staying afloat.
Although the dialogue in Jolly Roger is quite simple
(mostly shouts and commands) there is quite a lot of it. We had to record the actors before the
animation started, so that we could animate the lip synch. The voices were provided by Morwenna Banks
(Estelle), Gordon Kennedy (Jolly and Hugo) and John Sparks
(Roger). I had deliberately kept the
range of words very small – the same orders keep being given, but under
different circumstances. Captain Roger
shouts “Full Sail!” over and over again, but with a different emotion in his
voice each time – confident, terrified, mocking etc. With each “Full Sail!” I wanted
several takes so John had to shout this same little phrase all afternoon,
wrecking his throat in the process – he still hasn’t let me forget this.
Initially, I was going to make the film by traditional
cel-painting means and film it using a 35mm rostrum camera. However, during the pre-production (which
took place between other, commercial work the Astley Baker studio was involved
in) I realized that I wanted to do the whole thing digitally. This was for several reasons; Neville Astley
and I had been using digital trace and paint already on commercials and quite
quickly had started thinking of it as the normal way of working, it had great
advantages in terms of colouring the huge areas of flat blue needed for the
sea, the rough pencil animation could be scanned in and used as the final line
with no need for tracing (I particularly liked this aspect, since the
animators’ original drawings would appear in the final film, a bit like the way
I worked in The Hill Farm),
and it seemed that we could work out a way to animate the textured ships
directly in the computer – keeper them bobbing up and down, rocking and tipping
throughout the film. Many of the ideas,
in terms of animation technique, also came about because we were developing The Big Knights at the same
time.
The film was drawn on paper, with pencil, and then
these drawings were scanned into the Animo computer system at film resolution,
where the colour was added digitally.
All the backgrounds were created ahead of this process by scanning oil
painted textures into Photoshop, again at high resolution. Finally, the digital images were transferred
to 35mm film.
The paper animation all took place at Astley Baker’s
tiny studio in Soho, London using a team of thirteen animators; Neville
Astley, Mark Baker, Odile Comon, Tanya Fenton, Joris
van Hulzen, Cathy Lowdell, Gaston Marzio, Joanna
Migodzinska, Isabel Radage, Sarah Roper, Chris Shepherd, John Tynon and Pete Western.
We linetested using Geert Vergauwe’s Take 2 system which runs on the virtually
obsolete Amiga computer. Even the
cutting copy was assembled using Take 2.
I don’t know of a better linetest program.
The ships were treated as “movable backgrounds” and
all their final animation was done directly within the Animo computer. We used Take 2, together with the Amiga’s
paint program, D-Paint, to create a
rough version of how we wanted the ships to animate, so that we could include
their movement in our cutting copy.
Then, when the final work on Animo began, we used this cutting copy
version as the blueprint. We had the
Amiga computer set up next to the Animo computer and matched the moves visually
and in terms of timing.
It’s a feature of Animo that you can “lock” objects
together, so when the ships moved, they took the characters with them. Any amount of rocking, tipping or bobbing up
and down could be added and the characters would still match this movement. In fact, we added subtle ship movements
throughout the whole film – the ships are never completely still, they are
always gently moving up and down. One of
the trickier things we had to do, was to make sure that these movements flowed
across cuts – if a ship was floating up at the end of one shot, it had to drop
down at the beginning of the next. All
this compositing was done at Telemagination, London by Morgan Francis.
Next, the transfer from digital to 35mm film
began. This was carried out by Pete
Williams at Cinesite, London. The
process involves scanning 4000 lines by laser on each frame of film, and is
very slow and meticulous. The technique
is used whenever digital effects need to be incorporated into feature films and
it is calculated on a frame by frame basis.
We needed to transfer about 12 minutes worth of material which adds up
to 17,280 frames! Needless to say, we
were indebted to Cinesite, who took Jolly Roger on as a special project.
I had my same team of Danny Hambrook, Julian
Nott and Annie Kocur for the Sound, Music and Editing.
To match the visual bobbing of the ships, Danny had to
lay creak and groan sounds throughout the whole film, together with the usual
enormous amount of footsteps and spot effects.
As on The Village,
a lot of these “foley” effects were performed by Jack Stew. To make the ship creaks, Jack twisted a
wooden chair in time with the animation movements – we recorded this in one
take for the whole film. Then Danny moved these creaks slightly to get them
exactly in synch with the picture. Jack
also provided all the footsteps and the characters’ body moves. He made rustling, taffeta cloth noises for
Estelle’s dress, leathery squeaks for Captain Jolly’s
moves and wooden creaks for Captain Roger’s moves in the crow’s nest. The track laying took about
three weeks, and the final Dolby SR mix took two days.
Julian Nott came up with his “pirate theme” for the
music, a year in advance of the final dub.
This was because we needed it for the animation. One of the characters
(Hugo) had to whistle it, so we needed to work out its exact timing for the lip
synch. Recording the whistling turned
out to be quite difficult. The musical
theme covers a wider range of notes than most people can whistle, and it’s
quite fast. It’s very difficult to
whistle low notes, they tend to just come out as air. Dave Western, turned out to be the only
person capable of doing it, but the next problem was how to keep it in perfect
time. At first Dave whistled while
listening through headphones to a guide track of the tune played on piano. The problem was that it always sounded as if
he was trying to keep up the tune, rather than actually whistling it. As a last resort, Dave suggested that he try
it without the headphones, and the next take was the perfect one – in rhythm,
in key and absolutely frame accurate to the original tune.
Mark Baker December 1999
Jolly Roger Prizes
1999 Annecy Special Jury Prize
1999 Nominated for American Academy Award®
