Director Andrew McPhillips took home the Slamdance Grand Jury Award and a $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX for his animated short film Blood Will Tell (2007, 6 min, Canada), which incorporates 3D computer animation, 2D matte painting and live action with music written and performed by Sigur Ros, to tell the story set in 16th-century Holland of a mysterious visitor who attempts to hide from death in a dark, mosquito-infested well.
McPhillips started working on Blood Will Tell when he was at PDI. "I started doing some painting, because I paint a lot," McPhillips says. "I ended up telling what...
Director Andrew McPhillips took home the Slamdance Grand Jury Award and a $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX for his animated short film Blood Will Tell (2007, 6 min, Canada), which incorporates 3D computer animation, 2D matte painting and live action with music written and performed by Sigur Ros, to tell the story set in 16th-century Holland of a mysterious visitor who attempts to hide from death in a dark, mosquito-infested well.
McPhillips started working on Blood Will Tell when he was at PDI. "I started doing some painting, because I paint a lot," McPhillips says. "I ended up telling what would have been a filmic story within the painting, which was done in a pre-Raphaelite style, very Victorian-looking. The painting had a story, like a Norman Rockwell painting. I thought it would be neat if I could move the camera, so I turned it into an animation."
McPhillips regularly uses Maya, as well as programs such as Houdini and Renderman, and different proprietary and non-proprietary packages to achieve the look that he wants. On this film he used a custom set of plug-ins, including a special skin shader that gave the alien character an ethereal glow. "The character was meant to look embryonic," says McPhillips, "so the shader was slightly different than the skin shaders most people use."
McPhillips also wanted to get the old-fashioned flickering look that comes from the different frame rate and the inconsistent brushing of silver emulsion on film, which would cause frames to bloom due to the different intensity on each frame -- a very specific effect from silver. "One of the things that I tried to emulate in this film was what actually happens with that bloom," he explains. "There is a dual-tone look. The warmer colors underneath are almost sepia. There is also a cooler, silvery bloom. The other color in the film is red. I put red in for specific things, such as the blood. It is a story point that helps people focus on what is happening, as well as being something that looks nice visually. It really helped sell the story."
McPhillips re-storyboarded and restructured the film over the course of a couple of years as the idea developed. Besides the CGI, the film contains 2D and compositing. The film is "shot" in one take with a long, slow camera move -- done in Maya and Shake -- that allows the viewer to take in the details of the pictures.
McPhillips also designed the sound for the film. "In some cases I had the sound before the images," he says. "One of the first sounds you hear in the film is the sound of a gibbon in the zoo." Many of the sound effects were recorded live in Maine one summer when McPhillips rented an old 18th-century house for the summer. "The house groaned. There was an old Victrola. I ended up recording a lot of the house. I used this sound as the base of my canvas, in a very similar way that a painter washes a canvas before they start painting." McPhillips then layered new sound over the top of this ambient base of sound effects, which allowed him to build up the aural atmosphere for the film. Once he had the rough sound in, he would then redo the images and timing, adjusting the animation to the sound. "It was a very organic process, between the sound and picture," he says.
Around this point, McPhillips started to get locked into the mood of the music. There were two obscure Sigur Ros songs he wanted to use. He sent stills and then a work-in-progress, and got the okay. With the band's permission, he was even allowed to retime and layer the music differently than the original. "One of the challenges you have with really good music is the whole thing can turn into a pop music video," says McPhillips. "It was a real challenge to keep the music from taking over the entire film. The [images and music] need to mesh."
Incorporating live action presented other challenges. The children running around the windmill were a friend's children in costume shot against a green screen. The film was 12 fps, which worked well with the look of the project, but the live-action footage could not be filmed at that rate. McPhillips did not want them to appear in slow-motion, so he had to do some retiming and other processes in Shake to make the footage look animated and fit into the film. He also had to deal with the scale, so that the figures were not too big.
The film is 2K resolution and was output to HD using a color pipeline based on a bleach by-pass process that creates very black blacks that McPhillips became familiar with while working on Minority Report.
McPhillips grew up in London and has a background in photography and film. He received a scholarship to study photography at the Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. Since graduation, he has worked at most of the main animation and visual effects studios in England, Canada and the U.S. Currently he is working at Laika Studios in Portland, Oregon as head of lighting and compositing.
The film played at the Toronto, Hamptons and Santa Barbara Film Festivals. It will continue screening at digital festivals in the U.S. and abroad.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
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