Monday 25 March 2013

The Splinters

The Splinter Family, as it existed, is only briefly seen throughout William's Lullaby through glimpses and in the background. This is one of the benefits of tuning into this blog each week. Here you'll get to take a far more in-depth look into the lives of Thomas, Maggie and William Splinter prior to where William's Lullaby begins.

This week, we go down memory lane and take look at the Splinter Photo Album.

Photo credit goes to William's Lullaby Stills Photographer, Emily Arnold










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N.

Monday 18 March 2013

Let's Say Grace

Not long ago, Mike and I were sitting with our foley artist, Devin O'Haire during a spotting session for William's Lullaby and after a particularly tense scene that took place at the family dinner table, Mike said: "You must have issues with family dinners!"

His comment also came from the fact that the previous film we had worked on together, The Vicious Circle, featured a very dramatic scene set at dinner. I've said this before -- I don't feel you necessarily need to have "issues" with anything in order to feature it prominently in your art. But I have always been fascinated with the dynamics of a family dinner. Family dinners are like the board-room meetings of a house-hold and in film and storytelling, they can have the exact same dynamics if you wish. The mood of these scenes, often taking place in late evening/night with warm, ambient light sets a tone to whatever is going on dramatically in the story.

One of my favourite dinner scenes is this one from American Beauty (warning: course language)

"Lose it? I didn't lose it. It's not like 'whoops! Where did my job go?' - I QUIT!"

I thought I would share my very first attempt at a family dinner scene from The Vicious Circle in 2007. This was our first feature film, and as you can see, there is a great deal of work that goes into the writing, choreography, pacing and acting of a scene like this. Tough to pull off.


I write about family dinners in this blog because, rest assured, William's Lullaby features some extremely tense, dramatic, explosive and emotional scenes that take place at the Splinter dinner table. It is an unusual scenario in William's Lullaby, with a middle-aged man sitting across from a five-year-old. The possibilities that dynamic possessed excited me as a writer and director and I think the result will be extremely memorable.


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Bye for now.

N.

Saturday 9 March 2013

The Splinter House

Things are moving along quite nicely. I am happy to say that Paul Barton has completed the William's Lullaby score and it is truly exquisite. He has done an incredible job of incorporating the themes and story of William's Lullaby in his music and the result is a sophisticated and layered score that will keep you thinking long after the film is over.

I'll be spending quite a bit of time in these blogs speaking about creating the look of William's Lullaby in various posts. I've already begun to do that with last week's post on the transition from storyboards to screen. This week we'll take a look at the William's Lullaby set and specifically creating the look of the Splinter home.

I've always been a fan of art direction and set design. I love the idea of bringing a character to life through his or her surroundings in a play or film. I've mentioned my Vancouver Film School short, "The Boy Who Knew" on here before, but I'll take a moment to show it again in a different light. This was a film where I wanted to explore how you could create a character simply through set design and art direction without ever showing that person in the film. Can it be done effectively? You be the judge.




For the record, in reality this bedroom was originally a teenage girl's room, complete with a bunk-bed. My Art Director at the time, Red Albert, did a phenomenal job, in my biased opinion of transforming this into the bedroom of a boy prodigy and it fits well with the mood of the final product:




For William's Lullaby, I assembled a small team of extremely creative filmmakers and artists from Kingston, Ontario. Together we worked hard over five months of pre-production to create some of the very specific details needed for the Splinter home. Our goal was to create a home that was missing two crucial ingredients -- love and family. 


For William's bedroom (as seen above) we decided that a running theme throughout his environment would be a love for medieval knights and mythology, and this can be seen subtly with everything from the frame of the bed, the royal bedsheets, the knight's helmet on his dresser to the hand-drawn images of kings hanging on the wall. At the same time, we wanted William's bedroom to be very stark and bare, cold and unwelcoming -- as though slightly unfinished. The baron white walls leave much to be desired, casting harsh dark shadows which we can only imagine would terrify a young five-year-old in the dark.



For our next image we see the Splinter basement:


The script originally called for a living room environment, describing Thomas as often sleeping on the couch. During our location scout, this house provided us with an unfinished basement that peaked our curiosity and provided a much darker, sombre environment for Thomas. It made perfect sense to us that this man, suffering from depression and perhaps even a fear of raising his own son would create a safe haven from that world, a sanctuary of his own, off limits to his young five-year-old son where lost memories and ghosts abound in photo albums and home video flickers in the night light.

Thomas' bedroom had to have the same stark, bare and cold feeling of William's but on a very different scale -- from the adult perspective. And my art team, made up of the wonderfully talented Amanda Shaw, Kat Rush and Sierra Chaykowski did a wonderful job of adding subtle details, bringing to life Thomas Splinter's past AND present in one single room. Fantastic work, if you ask me. I won't spoon-feed you, rather I'll leave you to explore the clues. Very telling reveals of character in these pictures.







That's it for this week folks! Remember to join in the conversation on FACEBOOKTWITTER and comment below! We love to hear from you.

N.

Sunday 3 March 2013

From the Pen to the Screen

We have been working like crazy these last few weeks and will continue to for the next while as we near the finish line. Mike and Devin are working hard on preparing the film for a pre-mix and I'll be sitting down with Paul Barton in the coming weekend to go over the score in what will possibly be our final spotting session.

Meanwhile, on my end we've been colour balancing the film and preparing it for grading. Amazing progress has been made in regards to licensed music and we have a few surprises for everyone that we will reveal in due time. Biggest lesson here is -- never give up and exhaust all resources. Never assume the answer is 'no.' You will be surprised at what happens when you simply ask.

Gary Carr also began work on the end credits of the film. He is responsible for the ghostly "William's Lullaby" that appears in our teaser, using Leslie Martin's design. So to make a long story short, the end is in sight and the pieces are falling into place. But we are all aware of the fact that it is going to take a great deal of work in the coming months to get there. Game on.


A few posts back, I talked about how I storyboarded the entire film prior to casting as a way of preparing myself mentally for the task of bringing the visual style of the film to life. I thought I'd do a little less talking in this post and show you some examples of how those storyboards influenced the final product. If you take anything away from this post, it's that you don't need to be a great artist to storyboard -- stick figures will do! It's the idea that counts.


In most cases I was able to use stills from my location scout to visually lay out my shots. I would read the script line by line and picture the film, cut together in my head. What did I visually see? I would then do a few rough outlines, then pen the final drawing. Spending a great deal of time on each frame allowed me to really contemplate my reasoning for that shot and as you can see, for the most part, I stuck with that blueprint once I got to set.


As you can see in this scene, Richard and Toby bring a great deal of life to the image that I, unfortunately, can't quite express with my pen. Often, their motivation for blocking and action dictated slightly different camera positions and movements as seen by the slight difference between what is going on in my storyboard vs. the final scene.


Again, we were quite flexible with straying from the drawn image once we got to set but you can see that the essence of it is still there. Toby is a ball of energy and his jumping up onto the bed (as seen in the final scene) is far more dynamic than what's on the page and offers more excited camera movements to match his energy.


I said I wouldn't talk much in this post. I lied. There you have it. An example of just how much storyboarding helped me, and continued to help me in the editing room.

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N.