The Movie Formerly Known as "Lord of the Beans"
In the darkest of the Dark Ages, Atilla the Ham and the Fellowship of the Bean quest for the legendary lost legume!
70 minutes of animated antics and adventure! coming soon from Modern Animation.
June 19, 2005
First Post: Some history
I’m starting this production Log in June 2005, but I’ve actually been working on the project for much longer – so I’ll try to re-create the process from the beginning.
I actually came up with the character of Attila the Ham back in the late 1970’s. At this time he was just an idea and a handful of drawings – I thought it was a funny idea to have a barbarian pig. Never did anything with the character. Meanwhile I started working in the animation business; years went by as I was working on dozens of cartoons created by other people, often signing a contract stating that anything I created while employed by so-and-so is the property of my employer, etc.
In 2002 I was laid off from Fox Family after the company was bought by Disney. I was not under contract to anyone, and decided this was a good time to “create” something. I’d primarily directed TV animation, in the 7-20 minute format. I always wanted to do a “feature length” story, but it was unlikely any studio would throw a pile of money at me to do this. I remembered Attila the Ham, and decided he would be the star of my movie!
I thought about the world Attila lives in, the Dark Ages – and about the other characters he would meet in this world. I did some drawings and wrote down a bunch of ideas. Read a lot of history and mythology of the era (Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Anglo Saxon Chronicles, the Eddas, etc, etc) and came up with King Ethelred the Unsteady, his Visigoth daughter, Gwendolynne, Ciriouss the Jester, Baldwyn the wizard, etc.
By now I’ve talked to cartoonist Marc Schirmeister to help me with designs and gags, and the world of Attila began to take shape.
The story needed a plot, and the classic form of epic story is the Quest, and so came up with the idea of Attila’s Quest for the Great Blue Bean. I don’t want to give away any more of the story, so suffice it to say I wrote out the story outline, about 15 pages including some illustrations, and registered it with the Writer’s Guild in February 2003.
It took another 2-3 months to turn this into a first draft. Now this is where the really hard work begins! I had the luxury of time, and new work to pay the bills, etc., and when I looked at the first draft again a few months later, I could see that it needed work! The characters’ personalities were not clear, there were boring expository scenes to tell parts of the backstory that we didn’t need at all, plot holes galore — but the basic story was, I thought, very solid and entertaining, with all the kinds of stuff I always liked in movies (animated or otherwise) I wanted to have a kind of movie like Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” movies, which I thought were made of all the cool parts of every horror movie, with the boring set-up stuff cut out!
I even wrote in places for 3 songs (all the classic cartoon features have songs) Paul DiFranco, music producer extraordinaire wrote 3 cool songs to fit perfectly into the storyline.
The rewriting went on, and on, and on! When I got a scene that I thought was getting pretty good, I’d storyboard it, or get a storyboard artist who wasn’t too busy to storyboard it, and pay them what I could, either in cash, or sometimes payment was in the form of comic books from my collection! (I went through a lot of really valuable Golden & Silver Age comics to get this movie made!) Once a scene was storyboarded, it was easy to see what the problems were with it, so I would re-write on the storyboard, adding new dialog, new shots, cutting, pasting, etc. Every scene went through many multiple changes. Every change made to the storyboard would then be conformed into the script, where I’d now start seeing other things I could change.
Gradually the picture started taking shape – I thought I had some characters that an audience could get to know and really care about what happened to them. The next step, and this was I think Summer 2004, was to make an animatic of the whole movie. If anyone doesn’t know what an animatic is, it’s also known as a “story reel” and is a rough assembly of the movie, using still drawings from the storyboard and the sound track, put togerher in sequence, with the approximate timing it will have in the finished movie. This gives the Director a first look at how all the scenes are working, and whether some parts need to go back for more work!
I needed to record temporary dialog for all the lines, so this was me and my friends recording into a microphone, plugged into a laptop, in my garage. I Scanned the storyboard, and assembled the whole picture in Adobe Premiere. Well, now all the weaknesses of the story were obvious! So every scene got re-written, and re-storyboarded! (and then re-record temp dialog, cut it into the new version of the animatic, and make sure it works!)
By late 2004, it was all working! I’d titled the movie “Lord of the Beans”, and I had my Final script. I was ready to record my Final Audio.
Without mentioning any names, a Hollywood Voice-Over director who teaches voice-over classes helped me cast and record the entire picture for a very reasonable price, using some great soon-to-be-famous voice talent!
Now I sent my final script to the Library of Congress to register the copyright on my unproduced screenplay. I also registered the name “Lord of the Beans” as a Trademark. (You can not copyright a title, but that name can be Trademarked) For anyone else trying to do this: all this information is easily available online; just Google “Copyright” and “Trademark”.
There are many animation studios, mostly in Asia, that do Production Animation for TV shows. This is “work-made-for-hire”, the same as I have been doing for years. I pitched my movie to a studio whose work I respected. This would be an opportunity for them to actually OWN a piece of the work they do. The downside is that my finances are limited. 2007 is the year of the Pig in China, so this movie could do well in China! We decide to produce a sample of the first 5 minutes of the movie (with some reworking for Demo purposes)
Which brings me to the present time – I just got the finished Demo footage and it looks GREAT! My next step is to add sound effects & music (I’ll be using the “Lord of the Rings” soundtrack – since this Demo is non-commercial for promotional purposes only. For the finished movie we’ll have an actual score.) This Demo goes to China where, hopefully, the potential investors are pleased with the level of quality and they agree to fund the Chinese side of the production.
The Demo will also be shown at VSDA in Las Vegas, a trade show at the end of July attended by buyers and distributors of the Home Video business.
I’ll post the finished Demo on this site as soon as it’s finished. I also want to post periodically as the production continues, as a “Production Diary”, kind of like what Peter Jackson is doing! We’ll also be sharing some more model sheets, storyboards, designs, pencil tests, etc.
I’m projecting a start of animation by the end of August 2005, with principal animation finished in February or March of 2006, so there’s still lots of work to do!