Chaseblog » Forecast

83-47 To go…

Adriaan — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:11:57 +0000

Right, I missed myself here. Because of family circumstances I couldn’t write for a while. But I am back and animating!

I was in the Netherlands to work with Erik Stok, composer for Chase (and almost all my films, except Forecast). We worked on the last and longest scene, the train scene. Erik made a chunk of music for the train and I thought it needed something extra. So I added the sound of a train horn on top of Erik’s trombone. He is not always happy with my extra’s. But flexible as he is, he took it up and made it much better then it was. Normally sound effects are added at the end of the animation process. But because Chase is almost abstract I need a lot of sounds in an earlier stage. Without them I am not able to judge if a specific movement works out. Without the sounds you sometimes don’t know what you’re looking at. In this case it was even more important to work with the horn effect, because I wanted it on top of Erik’s trombone integrating it in his composition.

Paris

Adriaan — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 12:21:04 +0000

Yesterday , I had a meeting with my Dutch (Richard Valk) and my French producer (Nicolas Schmerkin) in Paris, halfway between Richard and me. It was bizar because normally it’s much colder here in the mountains as it is in Paris but yesterday it was the other way around.
I finished about 6 minutes of film and both my producers were very satisfied. As I am too, actually. After making Forecast, which was technically very hard, it’s a relief not to be limited by technical problems and being able to create what it’s in my head. Now, as in Barcode, I can focus on the film instead of on the software, as it should be.
It was exciting to see that despite the abstract images, Richard and Nicolas had no problem to understand the story.

Money

de tekstballon — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 11:00:14 +0000

Unfortunately, roulotte renting isn’t a very lucrative business, so I had to find means to make my film. My last film ‘Forecast’ we produced ourselves at our own studio Lokman Productions. Since this is a much bigger project and I’m living in France and not very acquainted with the French subsidiaries, we decided to look for a producer in France and a co-producer in the Netherlands. Nicolas Schmerkin of “Autour de Minuit”, who also distributed Forecast, was immediately enthusiastic of the project, as was Richard Valk our dutch co-producer.

To obtain subsidies, you have to fill out an application in which you specify the project and the budgetary needs. The problem with my films is that they’re almost abstract. There is no apparant storyline in the sense of going from a to b, no apparant characters and so on. In other words, how do I synchronize the images I see in my head with the images in the heads of the subsidiairies?

What we normally do is that Liesbeth interviews me and turns my pictures into words and writes that part of the application. But Chase was more complicated because I haven’t so far made a film with a clear storyline. Even I wasn’t sure I could transform a n exciting liveaction scene into an exciting abstract scene. So we first applied for a subsidy to make a test.

The dutch film fund wasn’t easily convinced and wanted only to give a part of the money to make a test and they demanded a more elaborate script. In retrospect I was very glad with their last demand because while developing the script I had to sharpen my ideas in order to develop logical storyline but also in a technical sense. Liesbeth, the french scriptwriter Sebastian Ors and I managed to write the script and together with the test I made and the budgetary explanation of the producers, we convinced not only the Dutch Film Fund but also the Filmfund of the Auvergne (where I live) and Arte that the film was worth making.