The Village
Directed by Mark Baker, Producer Pam Dennis Sound by Danny Hambrook, Music by Julian Nott, Editor
Annie Kocur. A Pizazz Pictures Production for Channel Four
Television.
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The Village 1993
The film
is set in a small, isolated village where everyone has something to hide. The villagers spend about half their time
trying to find out their neighbours’ secrets and the other half trying to
preserve their own. One villager seems
to have no interest in this way of life, and is considered an outsider. He comes under special scrutiny from the rest
of the village, and his every move is noted…
The Village is a 14 minute long animation film that
uses the traditional animation technique of cel and painted backgrounds. It has virtually no dialogue. It was funded by Channel Four Television and
produced by Pam Dennis at Pizazz Pictures, London.
Notes on the
making of The Village
Since leaving the National Film & Television
School in 1988, I had worked for a time at TVC, London before joining Pizazz
Pictures (now known as Studio AKA). At
Pizazz I designed and directed adverts and title sequences, but right from the
start I was also working on The Village.
Pam Dennis and Mario Cavalli,
were keen to help me get my next film in production and together we approached Clare
Kitson at Channel Four.
The Village started life as a sort of reaction to The Hill Farm. I wanted to show a darker side of rural or
isolated life, and I wanted the whole story to come from elements within the
location, rather than having other characters turning up to get the action
going. I spent a lot of time just trying
to invent elements that could fit into this kind of situation. During this period I couldn’t settle on a
final plot line, so my first proposals to Channel Four, were more along the
lines of describing the characters and possible ways the story might go.
The shape of the village, with all the houses looking
into a central courtyard was directly influenced by an engraving I had seen, of
the Globe theatre. I liked the idea of
the village having a definite inside and outside, with most of the characters
staying in their houses and occasionally scuttling across the courtyard from
one building to another. I worked out a
basic plan for the layout of the houses and who was going to live in each one.
Since the characters walk about a lot, this layout was
one of the few things that remained constant through all the drafts of the
script and storyboarding.
Once I had completed what I regarded as the final draft
of the script, I translated it into a drawn storyboard by first printing out
the typed script under blank storyboard squares. Filling in these blank squares with drawings
was a very fast process, since I had been imagining the action, and writing
about it for so long. I think the final
storyboard took about two days to draw (compared with a year, off and on
between commercial work at Pizazz, working on the script).
The image above is one page out of a total of thirty
eight that formed the final storyboard.
This in turn was the basis for the character design. I photocopied all the various drawings of
each character and made up a sheet for each.
I then based my final character designs on the elements from each rough
drawing that I liked.
I had animated The Hill Farm on my own, but
it had taken three years… The production
time allowed for animating The Village was just over three months, and I was
going to work with a team of animators.
This was one of the reasons the character designs had to be translated
into detailed model sheets. I also laid
out the whole film on sheets of animation paper, before the animation
started. A large proportion of the
budget was made of animators’ wages, so we had to keep the process as organized
as possible.
The team of animators were, Neville Astley, Mark
Baker, Sally Baxter, Roxanne Ducharme, Caroline
Cruikshank, Alyson Hamilton, Vanessa Luther-Smith, Gaston Marzio,
Tom Newman, Isabel Radage, Sharon Smith, Paul Stone, Pete Western & Julia Woolf.
Pam Dennis, the producer, and her assistant, Angela Cocker,
would check with us on a weekly basis to find out if we were keeping up with
the schedule. We were always behind, but
somehow we got the animation done, only straying a couple of weeks over
schedule.
The above image, is half a page from the production
route sheet. On the left are images
representing each shot from the film, with details of its length, which
animator was responsible for it etc. The
columns represent different stages: rough animation, cleaned-up animation,
background, trace & paint, etc. As
each shot’s elements were completed the relevant square was coloured in blue. The complete route sheet for the whole film,
is about twenty times as long.
At this stage none of the painted backgrounds had been
done. We had been working above pencil
drawings. Now Rachael Stedman,
began to work out techniques for translating them into coloured
backgrounds. Since the characters were
coloured using cel paint, we didn’t think they would look good on top of
backgrounds coloured with pencils (the technique I had used on The Hill Farm). Instead we used oil paint, applied very
thinly, onto stretched cartridge paper.
Before the oil paint was brushed on, we painted the whole sheet with
white emulsion, to give it some texture.
Each background took a while to dry, and had to remain stretched on its
wooden board for days. At one stage we
probably had at least thirty backgrounds on the go, in various states of
completion, in Rachael’s cottage in Scotland.
I think there were just over eighty backgrounds in all – which might
seem a lot, considering the film is set in one location. The trouble was that there were a lot of
different angles and view points.
The characters were traced and painted by a team at
Pizazz, led by Lynne Holzer and the film was
shot by Jim Davey.
Annie Kocur edited the rushes and Julian Nott composed his score
to the final picture edit. Danny
Hambrook started track-laying the sound effects. We had less time than on The Hill Farm, but we worked
in more or less the same way, track-laying in the day and recording effects at
night. The main difference was that we
worked digitally and in Dolby® stereo.
Certain effects proved harder to get than others – in particular the
scratchy noises made by the ants, which ended up being a mixture of several
sounds. Extra voices and effects were
recorded by Dominique Wolf and the final sound mix was by Adrian
Rhodes.
Mark Baker, January 2000
The Village Prizes
SPECIAL JURY PRIZE Annecy 93
THE CARTOON D'OR 93
SILVER HUGO PRIZE Chicago Int. Film Festival 93.
AMERICAN ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATION 93 for Best Short
Animation Film.
BRITISH ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATION 93 for Best Short
Animation Film.
BEST SHORT FILM Carrousel Int. Festival, Canadian Film
Board 93.
SILVER DRAGON (1st Prize) Krakow Film Festival 93.
2nd PRIZE Stüttgart Int.
Film Festival 93.
1st PRIZE Festival du Mons, Belgium 94.
HIROSHIMA PRIZE 94
Hiroshima Festival 94.
BEST TELEVISION FILM
Ottawa Festival 94.
