VARMINTS - by Studio AKA
tHoC create previs and help with story development for Studio Aka’s VARMINTS
Varmints has been nominated for ‘Best Short Animation’ in this years Bafta’s, to be held at the Royal Opera House on Sunday 8th February. All of our fondest regards and wishes go to Marc Craste, Sue Goffe and the amazing artists at Studio AKA.
The film is an adaptation of the book created by Mark Craste and Helen Ward. tHoC team Daffy, Matt and Anna Kubik worked closely with Marc over three intensive months sculpting story, shaping the varmints world, filming long CGI camera takes of the basic but key character performances, which acted as a guide for the rest of the production. Unlike a shot-by-shot based previs that is the norm, tHoC largely designed sequences as a single ‘performance’, covering the sequences from multiple cameras. This allowed Marc the ability to treat the editing of the previs almost as a live action editor might.
The choice of having the hero deliver long consistent takes also meant that sets were completely accurate and efficiently utilised; animators could deliver an entire performance as opposed to having to break their work into shots, characters could walk to any part of the digital environments and not drop into an empty void or impossible spaces. Again this allowed much greater freedom for Marc.
Marc comments about our collaboration:
“I very much wanted a team for the previs who would contribute ideas -
story ideas, staging ideas, lighting ideas. Not least because Varmints
was a very loosely sketched story at the start of the production and
needed this sort of input to pull it together. Preferably things should
be a lot tighter on a production like this, but sometimes due to
scheduling and budget considerations these things are unavoidable. What
I needed was a team who could cope with the sometimes vague, sometimes
non-existent direction and see it not as a liability but more as a
chance to shape the film. Often a meeting to discuss staging of a
sequence became a story meeting in which the original idea was tossed in
the bin and something new was developed. Of course this sort of thing
can quickly spiral out of control. But the central concept was fairly
solid so I always felt it was a process that did nothing but improve the
film. Although two major sequences were previsualised and then
ultimately dropped from the edit, a crucial element to the film - (the
tree that is at the heart of the story ) came out of these improvised
story meetings.
Parts of the film were storyboarded. Parts had only a couple of sketches
as a guide. And then there were parts of the film done from scratch
during the previs. Very often I was presented with multiple takes of
scenes within a sequence. Then I’d have the luxury of picking and
choosing those takes which I felt best sat together. Sometimes an extra
shot would be added, or perhaps a new idea would surface, a different
way of realising the action that was simply too good to ignore and so
the whole sequence would be redone. Along with story-telling skills,
cinematographic skills, and all the other skills that go with
previsualising, I think patience was probably the most essential
requirement. Hopefully the finished film will be worth all the hard
work.”
Credits:
Writer, Designer, Director: Marc Craste
Producer: Sue Goffe
Production Company / Animation Studio : Studio AKA
Previs team at tHoC: Andrew Daffy, Matt Estela, Anna Kubik
