Ruminating about the utter madness of making animated films the other day, a vision featuring a meeting of two people in a screening room flitted through my mind, and in this fantasy, person A showed person B a feature length live action film, and, after the credits had finished sliding up the screen, turned to B and said:
“OK B, I want you to make a film. It’ll be a special new type of film. What will be new and special about it is that instead of using these marvellous motion picture cameras that can, as you’ve just seen, make it so easy to automatically capture movement on film, what I want you to do is to draw and paint by hand every single frame of this new film, and in full colour mind you, then come back here in say, two years time, and show it to me.
Oh, and by the way, you’ll need at least a couple of hundred highly trained artists and technicians to help you, and a minimum of, what, fifty? sixty? a hundred million dollars?, that’s before all the marketing costs of course, to make the film. Sound OK?”
With a crazed look in his eye, person B turns to person A, and croaks: “All right… I’ll do it. When do I start?”
O.S. Sound of ambulance screeching to a halt outside. Doors slam. Multiple footsteps rapidly approach the doors.
The doors burst open, white coated medical orderlies armed with soothing syringes and tight fitting white jackets quickly subdue Person A and person B, and they are dragged, struggling, out of the doors…
(Fade to black)
If you concur with me that the creators of animated films are, how shall I say, differently gifted, then you should see what some of their audience get up to in their spare time….
Ben Millet has been building a prop from an animated film. Quite a big prop:
(These pictures get much bigger if you click on them.)
It’s the eponymous castle from Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 feature Howl’s Moving Castle. (Hauru no ugoku shiro)
It only took him 72 hours work to complete the paper model. That’s 2 working weeks in European measurements.
He wasn’t even paid to do it….
Ben works really fast, though, as this video shows. Maybe someone could offer him a job.
Howl’s Moving Castle from Ben Millett on Vimeo.
You can find Ben’s finished paper model displayed as a Flickr set.
And if you want to make the whole thing by hand yourself, the plans are here. (50Mb Download)
You’ll find the instructions here. (1.5Mb download.)
Via PaperKraft
One Comment
Incredible. The teacup is a fascinating item too; I would unquestioningly purchase it if I hadn’t recently stopped putting milk in my tea. Very good of you note Jeff Healy’s untimely passing too. Great musician, and, what a great radio host too; he used to have a program on CBC radio called ‘My Kind of Jazz’ in which he would impart both technical and biographical knowledge on artists from the golden age of jazz. Life is too short even at fourscore and ten.