Hi-8 Video and Hand Animation Combine for a Disturbing "Letter to Colleen"

Rotoscoping Done the Hard Way, With a Laptop, a Wacom Tablet, and a Copy of Flash

For an animated short making the festival rounds, filmmaking team Andy and Carolyn London didn't seek out the most cutting-edge workflow, or the most efficient one. Instead, they ended up shooting Hi-8 video, loading it into Adobe Flash, and then painstakingly tracing each frame on a Wacom tablet in stark, graphic-novel-influenced strokes. The process was nothing if not tedious — but it got the job done, and the Londons now have an animated short with enough detail in the image to survive a 35mm film-out. The total cost was $7100: $2,000 for production, including a laptop computer; $1,500 for music rights (one song by the Pixies and one song by the Violent Femmes); and $3,600 for a 35mm film-out.

Andy London has a background as animator and fine artist; Carolyn London is a writer and director. In 1999, they founded London Squared Productions, where they create live-action and animated films, music videos and commercials. The story of "A Letter to Colleen" is loosely autobiographical — the narration is drawn from a 25- or 30-page letter Andy wrote to a friend from his high school days describing the sexually charged events of his 18th birthday. "I had been haunted by that night for years," he says. The Londons hammered out a distinctive visual look for the film that matched the tone of the prose and the music in their heads. "We always spend a lot of time making the medium match the message," says Carolyn. "We threw away four or five different styles before we hit upon this one." The result is both funny and disturbing — a downbeat look at a formative sexual encounter seen through the abstracting prism of memory. "A Letter to Colleen" premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival and is slated to screen at the Foyle International Film Festival, the Stuttgart International Animation Festival in Germany, and the Victoria Independent Film Festival in Australia.

The first video below is a one-minute excerpt from the film. The second shows the same clip intercut with samples of the original Hi-8 footage the Londons shot in their New York apartment. The audio track has been edited, with permission, to remove explicit language.

Excerpt from "A Letter to Colleen"
Watch The Video   Download Flash 9 Player

Comparison with original Hi-8 footage
Watch The Video   Download Flash 9 Player

FILM & VIDEO: What inspired that visual style?

ANDY LONDON: I was very inspired by comic books. I used to do some graphic-novel stuff for Fantagraphics years ago, and I've always been inspired by RAW magazine — really raw, black-and-white stuff.

CAROLYN LONDON: Another influence is the music. We had the soundtrack in our heads before we even had the look of it. When Andy gave me the story, I said "I know exactly how this opens and exactly how it closes. I know what pieces of music we need to have." It needed to feel analog, not digital. That was where we started.

AL: Also things like Sin City, a bit.

CL: We're looking at a comic book now that Andy showed me when he met me in Eastern Europe 12 years ago. It's called Joe's Bar, by Carlos Sampayo and Jose Muñoz. It's about an imaginary New York City. It's very seedy and dark and contrasty, and it stuck with both of us because it's a sort of mythical idea about underground New York City life. It's not physically accurate, but there's an emotional accuracy that we responded to.

F&V: What about the decision to animate on top of footage of live actors?

AL: When we started last summer, we were doing a cut-out style — very flat, two-dimensional drawings — and they didn't feel cinematic. It was driving us nuts, because this had to have really dramatic angles, and at the same time it had to feel really intimate. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get that look. I had this old Hi-8 digital video camera, and I just began to shoot Carolyn in our apartment, posing as the main character. With a shower cap on her head. The footage looked terrible, but I loved the energy of it. I did an experiment and traced it, frame by frame, with a white line on a black background in Flash, and it really transformed it. It was amazing.

CL: We made a decision that it was going to be us in the film. I played the Colleen character, and that's Andy in it. Which adds another layer of weirdness to it. We could have cast actors. We didn't have to use ourselves. It was easier, but it was also more toxic. And it made it more painful, and more grueling.

We did board this out, but we'd start looking at the footage and editing it, and we'd say, "Well, we need more of this," and we'd go off and shoot more. It felt like it never ended. If people respond to the icky, visceral, edgy factor of it, it's because — for better or worse — we're involved in every single frame of it.

F&V: How painstaking was the process? Did you hand-draw every frame?

AL: Once we had the footage, we had to download it onto the computer. In Final Cut, we kept on coming up with edits. A friend of ours, a musician, did the soundtrack. We loosely edited to that voice track. And then we had 100 or so scenes. It was basically done at 12 fps. I took the video footage and poured it into Flash, and then, with a Wacom tablet, I drew out every frame. Sometimes the footage was blurry, and I just had to animate. I'm a professor at the Pratt Institute and I recruited some interns to help with some of the group scenes. Still, it was a very difficult task. There was a technical hurdle because Flash wasn't designed to do what we wanted to do. Once we got into more than 30 or 40 frames with all those lines, the computer would crash and I would lose things. So we had to break it into smaller segments.

CL: We finance and produce everything ourselves, so it's not like we had an IT guy.

AL: I was the IT guy and I was lousy at it. Whenever we went to visit family or went someplace on business, I would take the laptop and the Wacom tablet and work on it there as well. We've done stop-motion films, which are similar in terms of tedium, but this was probably the most tedious thing we've done. You've got to get the eyes just right. The hardest thing was the faces and the hands. It was hard to get the contours right so it felt like there was volume there. I had interns posing for me, all kinds of tricks. I thought it would be just tracing, but it was a really tricky process.

F&V: It doesn't sound like you'd make another film this way.

CL: It comes down to what the look of the film requires. We would be game to do it if we had the right crew and the proper support. But this one kind of killed us.

AL: It does work! What we really needed was more money. We did this for a couple thousand bucks. The most expensive thing was buying a laptop.

CL: Actually, the music licensing.

AL: That was a headache. It was certainly more money than we thought it would be. We became friendly, though, with the lawyer for the Violent Femmes.

F&V: What about the snippets of live-action? [Some of the Hi-8 footage survives in the film, albeit with animation drawn on top of it.]

AL: We batch-captured it, automated the filters in Photoshop, and then reimported the footage into After Effects. I did a lot of research, but I couldn't find a filter that didn't feel like a filter. S we were taking Xerox copies and graphic pen looks and mish-mashing it until we got something we liked.

CL: And then you would go back and rotoscope on top of certain pieces.

AL: We actually rotoscoped that live-action footage the same way, then took the live footage, turned it into stills, and filtered it in Photoshop.

F&V: Why did you bring the live-action imagery into it at all?

AL: Energy.

CL: We did that batch-capture filtering on party scenes, with more than one person. Where there's just one person [in the frame], it feels ghost-like, and that felt appropriate. It was like you were in a dream or experiencing a dream state through that character. When you're just line-drawing, you don't have shades and shadows, and your eye doesn't know what to look at, exactly. So when we brought in that filter look, it made it very contrasty, and created highs and lows. It have you that demented feeling.

AL: I wanted it to look like a Goya etching, like one of his nightmare scenes. I wanted it to have depth and perspective. I wanted it to be frightening. Without that, it felt flat. That was one of the hardest things we did in the whole film.

F&V: How do you screen it? From HD tape?

CL: We're transferring it to 35mm now.

AL: And it was designed for 35mm.

CL: Big, the lines look incredible. They don't disintegrate and they don't crumble. Andy did a great job.

AL: It was such a headache, but I think we got it. The 35mm print doesn't seem to be a problem. I love it because it has film grain in it.

CL: They're spending a lot of time making the blacks look right.

F&V: Isn't that expensive?

CL: Oh, yeah. We're so broke right now.

AL: It's killing us. We can't afford eggs.

CL: But it's getting into all these Oscar-nominating festivals. And the attitude is, you have to be in it to win it.

AL: To put all that energy into a film, you do want to see it look its best. We've applied to five festivals, and we're five for five right now. So I'm really happy.