The Story of Moon Bird
Fri, Oct 2nd 2009, 10:47
There’s many different phases to making a film. The first moments are always fun. At the genesis of the idea you feel excited and open to all the possibilities. There’s the quick fire ideas that add to whole. There’s the first few loose sketches to pour over which unlock the doors to a new world. At the end of this first phase there may be some notes and maybe even a loose story or script.
The next few phases tend to be more frustrating, but are essential to get any film made… the waiting for funding, the writing and rewriting the script, locking down the design, the animatic, the blocking of the scenes…
Finally animation starts to roll out and then the post production can start which is a mixture of both frustrating and exciting as the film starts to come alive (which is where we are now).
The Genesis of the Moon Bird
For The Moon Bird the first stage was Greg going on holiday and asking me to write him a Brothers Grimm style story. That was in August 2007. It was penance for when I was away on sabbatical, leaving Greg to direct Dog Tired on his own.
The first thing I noticed about the tales collected by The Brothers Grimm was that they were often very short – sometimes only a hundred words; but they all had a similar style, often morality stories, with compelling melodramatic characters. There was often shocking violence coupled with extraordinary visual ideas, like the lady who has her hands cut off and is then given new hands made from silver. There was often a happy ending. Bad guys got their comeuppance. Good people usually did well in the end but often went through terrible suffering and loss on the way there.
I wrote a 1200 word tale in their style (or at least the old fashioned style of the English translation) and that became the basis for the film we’re making now. It started:
“Once there was a little girl called Teardrop. Teardrop never knew her kind Mother or her noble Father because they were struck by plague not long after she was born. And so Teardrop was raised by an old Aunt who lived in the forest.”
The story evolved over time. In the Christmas of 2007 Greg spent a lot of time in visiting the hospital because of an ill relation, and started to work on storyboards during the long hours spent there. Those eventually fed ideas back into the story, and also provided useful in our application to Screen WM and 4mations for funding.
When the time came for the application, the story changed again, becoming about 400 words longer and including more detail about Teardrop’s past. We also put more emphasis on Teardrop being an active character. Here’s the opening paragraph from that version.
“Once there was a little girl called Teardrop, born on the last full moon of the year. Her Mother and Father were married many years but had never borne a child. When at last they found themselves with a baby to call their own they could not stop weeping for joy and so called her Teardrop.”
Finally, once we had the funding in place, it was time to tackle the script. The first draft was quite faithful to the written story and had a number of flaws; chiefly Teardrop was still too passive as a character. We made some notes and also gathered feedback from our exec producers Camilla Deakin and Dan Lawson and our mentor Golly at Aardman.
The second draft of the script stripped out a lot of original story elements, changed locations and altered the ending quite dramatically. In fact, if it was a well loved book, you’d probably scoff at our adaptation saying… well, it wasn’t like that in the book.
And the tweaks haven’t stopped there. We altered elements after watching the animatic. And even now, during the animation, we are adding small details to make the story flow.
Soon the film will be complete and then the story will be truly locked down… except that then it’s the turn of you the audience to watch and interpret it. I wonder what people will make of it?
