Matthew Roberts

MA Assessment - transparency

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED - CLARIFICATION  REGARDING THIS PROJECT

When assessing this project, you might come across acronyms of the name of the project. It is not practical to use the fill title when working with digital files, so you might see these as abbreviations:

• EHL   
• Eagle
• Moon

These should be self-explanatory. EHL is an acronym of “Eagle has landed”. “Moon” is what I called the project prior to writing the script, at the research and earlier development stage.

TRANSPARENCY

Most of the work on this project is mine, however there are collaborations, and these are credited in my paperwork and in my blog. The most notable collaborator is Martyn Eker, who drew out the line drawings of the characters.

Character Design

It is clear, from my earlier storyboard and animatic that I had worked the whole concept out, and knew who all the characters were supposed to be by myself. I did spend a considerable amount of time attempting to draw the characters myself, but did not have the skill to be able to do this consistently, with turnarounds for all the characters (who would later require animating).

I worked with Martyn of a period of 4 months, and managed his workload. His briefs were given over emails, through web-based collaborative task-management software, over Skype, and telephone. For each character I supplied a detailed brief, reference images, back story and direction. I then spent a lot of time in feedback sessions helping to get the look I was after, which was based on a 1950s or early 1960 animation style (which ties into the period covered in the narrative). There were some rejected concepts, and there was trial and error.

Many of the original Drawings are in my paper file (see characters). They arrive as line drawings, which I render as digital characters which can be set up, or ‘rigged’. This process is very time-consuming. Each character is rendered in all poses, with additional replacement animation parts (blinks, hand-shapes, different mouths etc). They all need to be broken apart into ‘puppet’ like forms, so they animation can work properly.

I feel strongly that although I needed some help with design (Martyn has done a great job), there is still a vast amount of work that needs to happen beyond sketches to turn these characters into the fully rendered colour characters you see in my animatic (and the full film, when it is completed)

Sound / Narration / VO

I made an original recording on which the later, high quality voice over is based. If the two VO versions are compared, you will find that they are basically the same. The words and timing is the same. The only difference is that my version was recorded on a mobile phone in an echoey room, and the proper one was recorded properly by people who’s voices sound great.

I have written separately about the narration process

I felt I had written a strong brief, so was confident that I could audition for talent via the Internet. All the requirements, references, script, storyboards and original VO were placed in a blog post. I received a dozen submissions. Three or four were good. One was great, and was also already recorded properly and could be used (I pulled in a favour, who is a sound recordist in film and TV). All I needed from this stage were some believable American voices for the end section. All of the British people I asked couldn’t really do American accents well. I then did a further search through Facebook, and got some real americans to record themselves and send it over email.

I used to own a recording studio, but closed this around the same time I began studying at University. It is a fact that digital technology has made everything cheaper and easier. Things that used to get made in large expensive facilities (such as production houses and recording studies) can now arguably be made on a laptop. The problem here is that with things like with audio production, a good room with good monitoring (speakers) is still a requirement if you want to be able to get a good mix-down.

The voiceover for my project was compiled on my laptop in Logic Studio as a multitrack recording. This meant all the right bits were arranged in the correct timings so it flowed like it should. I then took this to my former production partners studio where wee mixed it together. He was always the engineer, so has the technical know how and the ‘ears’ for fine details, so by working with him, the audio has that extra shine.

This audio was then available to me, still in separate tracks of audio (foley, astronaut 1, astronaut 2, Houston, main VO etc), so these can still be manipulated and edited further whilst in production.