Pippa Pieces

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee opened nationally last week.

I'll assume Verizon has once again screwed up on phone service, preventing the avalanche of new work from advertising bigwigs and movie moguls.

It's currently playing in two Manhattan theaters, Long Island, White Plains, and North Jersey so I assume most Americans will have a nearby theater screening it.

As I've written previously, our little bit of animation was very difficult to produce.

The characters were more like portraits than caricatures, making the reproduction exceedingly difficult.  On top of that Leah Tinari's painting style is specific in its shape and shading, but our production required too many shortcuts to match each of these specificities.

We did animate a shadow pass.  Here's an example on the Winona Ryder character.

Doug Compton did the animation.  Several young artists worked on the assisting.

We also asked Leah to create the backgrounds herself.  Placing the animated approximations of her characters into an environment fashioned by her own hand gives them some authenticity (we hope).

Pip Up

Saw The Private Lives of Pippa Lee finally last night.

There was a special screening at the Landmark Sunshine hosted by Variety and the American Museum of the Moving Image.

As we've written in the several posts on the production, we always felt it was a remarkable script.  The film is interesting, but it would hard to top the excitement of the script.  It's still a special picture.

It was disappointing that they cut off the projection before we got to our credits (John Dilworth tells me he saw our credits at an Academy screening).  They're pushed behind all the drivers and assistants and hairdressers assistants.  No belittling their work, or the work of colorists and other technicians -but our contribution was actually filmmaking, albeit brief in screentime.  Animation is treated as an afterthought, even though its the equivalent of handing over 30 seconds of a film to another director to make.

Producer Lemore Syvan was on hand to answer questions.  The host from Variety did an excellent job interviewing her.

Her story is interesting.  She began in journalism.  Said she wanted to work in film.  Was turned for a job, then called back when no one else would do it for the rate.  She was hired as a PA, ended the production as Line Producer.  She admits she didn't know anything about the technical aspect of film.  She learned on the job.  But she's intelligent and clearly had something to offer, because of that she quickly worked her way up the ladder.

The opens in select cities at the end of November.  It's an honest, literate film that is full of terrific and honest dialogue.  And a decent little sequence we did.

Standing Outside the Intersection of Grosz and Kostabi

Leah Tinari paints people who are having more fun than you will ever experience.

Each piece in her show at Mixed Greens is a snapshot of beautiful people in a moment of joy. Really, though, they can't be having that much fun.

Like all those photographs of friends living it up, wildly shouting, smiling, leaping into the sky -the frozen moment, played up for the camera and posterity. And these are the images that form our memory. We are apt to recall the photograph of a day in the sun better than the day itself.

The details Leah paints, the way she twists the shapes as if the canvas itself were drunk, there's something ominous in all that fun. This is the night Joe broke Jill's nose with a bottle. Here's the last time we saw Kyle before the accident. The next day, Jane was committed.

I know her subjects are drawn from her friends, and she's projecting her own joyful spirit onto them -pulling out every ounce of excitement. Still, I can't help but feel there's something sinister to all of those wide mouth smiles.


In working with Leah and her painting on The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, we had to figure out how to animate her portraiture, keep its distortions, but retain pretty likenesses of the stars. I'm not sure how successful we were. I think her style would be best suited to a Waking Life approach with loose bubbling boundaries to line and color.

Her painting technique is fairly simple, layering gauches. Two things, above her excellent draughting, stand out.

First, color. In this show she has a series of black and white paintings modeled after two sequences of photos. These show range and sensitivity in grey scales which make them lush and (though monochrome) wildly colorful.

Second, modelling. She makes great shapes with highlight and shadow to give form. There's limited perspective to her paintings, everything is wide-angle, in focus. Full form is given through the contour of color on the figures with little use of perspective or foreshortening.


In many ways her work is like a rock-and-roll Rockwell, both work from photography (though Leah is not a slavish as Norman) and both present a sort of idealized landscape. The difference between the two is the gap between illustration and fine art.

Opening Night

No, not another post with a Cassavetes name drop. This one is a Keanu Reeves name drop.

More like a Winona Ryder and Robin Wright Penn name drop.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, which we did a little piece for (chronicled here, here, and here) is premiering in competition at the Berlinale next week.

The debut screening is Monday, February 9th at 10:30 PM.

I'll be posting any mentions of our animation. And if anyone catches it in the Festival, let us know what you think.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (post 3 - production)

After agreeing to produce the segment we got on the phone with the film's director, Rebecca Miller, and the character designer, Leah Tinari.

We discussed the action and the timing. Leah drew up this storyboard (there's another which contains few more gestures and a scene which was ultimately cut).

She hadn't done a storyboard before, so she came into the studio and we looked at some old boards together and we gave her the blank forms and talked about what each shot should be. As you can see in the typeset board panel 4 is a jump, so we noted to keep the same framing as shot 2.

Shot 2 is a dynamic and difficult scene to animate. The foreground character, Winona Ryder, begins in place but not on a hold -she's bobbing in anticipation. The other character, Robyn Wright Penn approaches from the distance animating forward in perspective. At one point Winona runs towards camera and the background begins to animate back in perspective.

One thing made it a little simpler, the action moved in a continuous direction. This makes the art production harder (more paintings to make) but can make the brainwork of animation easier. It's essentially straight ahead.

Here's the pencil test for Winona in scene two.

This is with inbetweening and shadowing.

Here are Doug Compton's first few keys:
above: B1
above: B4 (head moves, anticipating body action. Back leg stiffens.)
above: B7 (pivot on back foot, full anticipation)
above: B10 (here's an "extreme", Winona reaches her peak height)


above: B13 (BOOM! to quote John Madden. She begins forward -note the weight on the front foot)

above:B16 (rest of the body follows through. Hips at axis.)

The charts are cut off from the scans. Here Doug has left two in betweens. He's charted them so the assistant can easily follow through on the direction of the movement.

Winona is coming forward, so the eases in the animation are built into the in betweens. There's often a half -a inbetween directly in the middle of the two keys, and then a third between the first key and the middle drawing, sometimes even a drawing between them.

Another thing that Doug does which is helpful to assistants and makes for better action is to blue line "C/D"s (complete drawings).

B18 is not a key, but a few important parts of the character were drawn and the rest blocked in loosely with blue. Note the "CD" mark on the lower right hand side.

Also note, the exposure sheets for this are extremely simple.

There's something deeply pleasing about simple exposure sheets.

The clean up work was particularly difficult. These aren't caricatures, they're portraits -that makes drawing the likenesses tricky. On top of that they're scaling up and moving in perspective so that every drawing is slightly different.

With a cartoon, this action isn't much of a problem - a little distortion in a couple drawings will go unnoticed and may even "improve" the animation. Not so here. A little distortion could turn a beautiful actress into a full color monster.

Of the two, Winona proved a little easier. Her features are bigger and rounder. For Robyn we took several different tactics and wound up spending almost two weeks just figuring out how to get her right.

Then came the problem of painting. Here's basically how we did it.

1) flat colors
2) shadows
3) highlight
4) lines
5) faces
6) hair

Each one of these steps was essentially "by hand", but using Photoshop.

In motion, the painting resembles Leah's original work. I wish we had the resources to devote the energy to getting it perfect, but as it stands it's not terrible.

The film is finishing up post production now, and should be in theaters early next year.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (post 2 - preparation)

Q. How can you produce complicated animation on an invisible budget?

A. Brains and personality. Brains and personality.

1) Pass on as many costs as possible. "Pippa Lee" was providing the illustrator, so we made sure her fee was outside of our budget.

Our relationship with Leah was the same as if she was on our payroll (and hopefully we can hire her to work on a future project), her checks came from someone else. Because of this, we pressed her for more artwork than we typically would ask from an illustrator who hasn't previously worked in animation -a couple painted positions for every scene, production backgrounds, etc.

It turns out we probably would've needed all that material from her anyway. Her illustration style is very peculiar and we wanted to capture her "eye" as much as possible. Regardless, the plan was to bilk her for everything we could.

above: background. We lashed Leah repeatedly until she painted this. We berated her to do it again to different specs. We dripped boiling water on the back of her neck to work faster.

Also, we pushed all of the lab/post production costs onto the production company. For a theatrical features these costs can be extraordinarily high. The post work for twenty seconds can easy come to a few thousand dollars since the length falls well short of lab minimums.

Often you can bill messengers and FedEx directly to the client account. We had them agree to this. We didn't take them up on it, everything was done online. The only thing requiring a messenger was the final delivery which I took to Technicolor personally.

2) Spend in the right places. What's the most important of the project? In this case it's two fold: art production and animation. The art production would be difficult, but I was foolishly confident I could figure it out and plow through it mostly by myself.

The animation, on the other hand, had to be solid.

The Pippa producer brought up Flash in our initial conversations. After reading the script and study the illustration style I haughtily discarded the notion. I didn't even bother explaining it to them, just saying "You can't do this in Flash, not if you want it look anything like Leah's painting or move with a more than a modicum of realistic fluidity." (That may be a direct quote. Note how I "haughtily" dismissed their idea. Sometimes I actually talk like this, especially when trying to bully someone.)

The best guy I knew for the job was Doug Compton. Not only is Doug a first rate animator, we've worked with him for a long time and on a lot of projects. Familiarity plays a big part in making things on the cheap.

More than familiarity, his strengths as animator played into the needs for this sequence. He has good draughtsmanship, especially in the human figure. He can animate dynamic action and character.

On top of that, Doug works very cleanly and is extremely orderly. He'll draw more keys per shot than most any other animator, and even most of the breakdowns. He also has the habit of blue lining certain inbetweens or breakdowns and making them C/Ds (shorthand to assistant to "complete drawing"). His exposure sheets are clear and he charts inbetweens with simple precision.

Basically, he's the guy to turn to if you're going to have amateurs fill in at other positions.

3) Only test when necessary.

John Hubley never pencil tested any of his work for Children's Television Workshop -couldn't afforded. Besides, he was brilliant and he had Tissa David animating.

In our case, Leah Tinari is a brilliant woman and Doug Compton was animating.

We did do a pencil test, but didn't dawdle over it.

We didn't spend weeks and weeks doing pose tests and style tests and character rotations and all that stuff. Sure, all those things are useful. But they're also expensive.

4) Fill in your crew with amateurs to support the professionals.

If you've got animator who knows what they're doing, 75% of your worries are over. You'll have a decent enough piece, all things considered.

On this project, we had the luxury of time (another side effect of working for decent people). Most of the assistant work -the inbetweening, clean up, and highlighting was done by a couple of my students: Kristin Collins and Noella Borie.

Both had just a year or so of animation classes, very little experience with drawn animation and none in the traditional studio assembly line.

Both have good drawing skills and both are smart and hard working.

It turned out to be (almost) a fair exchange. We invested time in teaching them how animation is done. They learned more about filmmaking in the weeks spent working on this project than they will in four years of art school.



5) Plan your production methodology. Animation is a process. You do lots of drawings, color 'em in, get 'em on film or tape.

The details of that process vary with every job. For this film we broke the process down into two groups with several steps.

I. Animation. This consisted of the following:
a) layout. These were done, basically, by Leah. I reworked them some for animation. I knew they weren't "good" layouts, but I also knew Doug had dealt with worse.
b) animation. We'd give Doug the scene timing, he'd do the rest.
c) inbetweening.
d) clean up. With some illustration styles you can just take the animator's drawings and color them in. Not here. We knew we'd have work these extensively to get them right.
e) highlight/shadow animation. A lot of the time, we'll just do this in Post-Production or follow through painting them in Art Production. Too complex to leave until later.

II) Art Production
a) scanning. DUH!, right? When you've hundreds of drawings to scan at film resolution, scanning is a big part of your pipeline.
b) cel preparation/file processing. Let the machines get things ready for you to paint.
c) opaquing. Basic filling flat colors.
d) self/colored lining.
e) shadow/highlight passing.
f) hair. I didn't know how to paint this, so left it for last in hopes of inspiration.
g) AfterEffects camera.

That was the plan, and for the most part we followed it. Not too strictly, the most important thing about producing decent work cheaply: be flexible with your plan.

Next time: some animation drawings.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (post 1 - preamble)

Several months back we got a call from a live action production company looking for a ballpark quote on twenty seconds of animation for a feature film.

They already had an illustration style in mind and directed us to the artist's website.

"Oh boy, that'll be tough," I thought, as my pupils rolled into dollar signs. I called back with a reasonable quote -around what our segment for The Stepford Wives cost. This would be shorter with no compositing (which always allows for higher billing) but monumentally more difficult to produce. Even though it's an "indie" film, its a difficult bit.

The illustrator, Leah Tinari, had created the cover for the British edition of the book. The director loved it and wanted somehow to incorporate it into the film.



In addition to the website, they also sent us the entire script of the film and a few publicity one-sheets. Even though the animation took up only two paragraphs of the 120-some pages they sent us the whole thing.

I can't overstate how much easier that makes creating the animation. It was also a very interesting script.

Gail Levin (who we do a lot work with) had dealt with the writer/director Rebecca Miller while Gail was making the "Great Performances" film on The Misfits. The John Huston film was written by Rebecca's father, Arthur Miller. Gail saw the one-sheet while on my desk while we were cutting and offered up what a pleasure it was to deal with Rebecca.

With all of that circling through my head, we agreed to make the piece even though they had only budgeted -no exaggeration - 5%, that's FIVE PER CENT, of what the animation should be.

We consented to offer our services, essentially, for free. I wonder if any of the actors would do the same thing? Or the lab? Or the electricians? Actually, its more like we would be paying for the a little part of the film. I wonder if we can get Executive Producer credits?

Although I joke about the budget, it's a credit to the crew of Pippa Lee that the only time I mentioned -or even felt the urge to mention -the puny and insulting budget was the first time they told us what they could spend. Sometimes there are factors that drive you to produce a job despite impossible budgets. Maybe it's the opportunity to reach a new venue, or try a new style, or just to stay busy. In this case, it was sort of a gut feeling -the script was beautiful and compelling. The "clients" were gracious and intelligent.

All of those factors make working on a project like this far more rewarding than a project with 20 times the money managed by insufferable creeps.