We’ve been working on a trailer for a while and finished it earlier this week.
I was immensely lucky that StudioAKA were up for me putting a select team of artists together to bring the illustrations to life. The artists there have a tremendous sense of craft and are ever-enthusiastic in finding new techniques to lean into every nuance of a design and give it its full range.
Justine Waldie cleaned up all my rough animation and ironed out the creases without telling me, and Will Eagar ( yes, that is the correct spelling. Thanks to all those who suggested a correction) layered in all the watercolours and textures using a beautiful technique that he has refined over years and within a short time, there were the illustrations …alive. Seeing the results of people working with this level of craft and skill never gets old.
Back when we had a rough timing of the animation, we had to start thinking about music in order to refine the timing of the performance. I wanted it to be rather like a silent film with titles in between. This seemed to inherit that interesting way that books have of placing an idea into your head with only unspoken words. Then we would cut back to animation that responds to the idea. Ever so simple. Just like a picture book.
But time went by and we still had no music.
As chance would have it, whilst timing out the layouts and rough animating the scenes, I had a tune rolling around in my head. It was a tune that I had found myself whistling a few mornings back and I wasn’t sure where it had come from.
Just for fun, I whistled the tune and placed it against the picture. It worked. And the timing was so correct, it made me wonder if I had originally hummed the tune whilst thinking about the animation of the trailer right from the get go, maybe as a device for timing it- but forgot about it after.
I played the tune on my Ukulele. Which I only play for me. It’s kinder to the environment that way- and I thought…’hm this could work.’ Fortunately my friend and colleague Marc Craste is one of those maddeningly talented people who does most things with effortless ease. He also happens to be a great guitar player. He found the sweetest refrains to play with my Ukulele tune. We came up with a cosy lumbering bass line (it was always the Bear in my mind) and we were off. I practiced for over a week. And then we recorded at the studio….
I’d do the tune of the Squirrel on my ukulele, Marc would do the bass line of the Bear and also the guitar in-between. The glue that held them together.
Marc played several takes, each with elegant, subtle little differences. Then I joined in.
When I was a kid, my Grandad once sat me on his knee and played his little electric organ for me with a roll-up hanging out of the side of his mouth. My Grandad was one of those people who looked like they have tree in their genes. He was a solidly built fellow. His fingers were very wide and when he pressed them to the keyboard, he sometimes clipped the keys on either side. So you got little side notes playing every now and then..
When he finished, I remember pressing a white key with my little finger. I probably could have put all my fingers on the key and still not clipped the sides and even at the age of five, I understood the technical difficulties my Grandad faced. But I loved the way he played it.
I am not the impressive figure my Grandad was back then. But listening back to me playing in the sound session, I sounded as if my fingers were twice his size. After a careful discussion with Marc and Nic Gill, our sound technician/editor/and amazing composer, we fired the Ukulele player and let Marc’s guitar and sweet bass line show us how it was done.
Nic brought it all seamlessly together and, adding sound effects with his usual flair for less is always more, we finished it.
I’ll post it here again,
Many thanks to Sue Goffe, Marc Craste, Phil Hunt, Justine Waldie, Will Eagar and Nic Gill and Nikki Kefford-White for making it all happen.