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.
May 1, 2006
Update 4-30-01
Haven’t updated this production log in a long time – a lot has happened in the last 9 months! I’ve been really busy, but now I finally have a chance to post again.
When we last posted, we finished the 6-minute “demo”. This was basically the first 6 minutes of the movie, with all the “set-up” dialog stuff cut out – so it’s pretty much all action: The siege of Ethelred’s Castle by Attila & the P’Orks. This was a pretty exciting sequence with lots of action & some (I hope) funny jokes. My 5 & 8 year-old niece & nephew laughed, so that’s a good sign! We also edited a one-minute “trailer” as a “teaser” – hopefully this makes you want to see more. (The teaser has been on the website for the last 7 or 8 months)
Anyway, we made about 60 copies of the Demo, in a nice DVD case, just like the product should look on the store shelves, and took it to the VSDA show in Las Vegas. They have a filmmaker’s section where you can show off your movie and make contacts with all the Home Video distributors. We had a table with a small DVD set-up playing the “teaser” on a loop.
We had a lot of interest from various distributors, and we finally signed with Marvista to distribute. Having a distributor made things more “real” and I soon made a deal with the studio in China to do the animation. My Sister-in-law helped out with some of the money, and the rest came from a Home Equity Line of credit. (You really have to believe in what you’re doing and/or be completely obsessed in order to pull this off!)
About this time I got a letter from attorneys representing the Saul Zaentz company, producers of the Ralph Bakshi directed animated feature “Lord of the Rings” and owners of the trademark for “Lord of the Rings”. They wanted me to cease & desist production on the motion picture entitled “Lord of the Beans”. After speaking with my attorney, I learned that while there was nothing they could do legally to stop me from using the title, but they could cost me thousands of dollars in legal fees with letters, depositions, and other expensive legal stuff. So I decided to abandon my trademark for Lord of the Beans, and title my movie “Attila the Ham and the Great Blue Bean”.
I went to China for a few weeks in November/December to work on the layouts for the movie. This gave me some more control over the final animation. The overall pacing & flow of the story was established in the animatic – then detailed timing is worked out on the exposure sheets, with indications for specific poses to “hit” on particular frames – sometimes hit the pose hard, and sometimes ease in or out – “holds” are also indicated on the exposure sheets – Now in layout I can really lock in the drawing for the key poses. I can also work out any “straight ahead” animation, like some of the dancing action, etc.
Now it’s several months later, I’ve received all of the animated scenes – delivered to me as HD targa files. With Final Cut Pro, I can edit the entire movie at “Offline RT” compression, and then re-connect to the full-rez animation frames for my final online output. I’ve done a first edit, with some temporary music lifted from various soundtrack CDs – a lot of Howard Shore’s LOTR score, also some Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western and Bernard Hermann from Harryhausen movies. (this is to set the right mood for scenes – and to show my composer the kind of feeling I have in mind.) I sent this off last week to Marvista for some feedback. I’ve gotten most of my retakes in and should be ready to “lock picture” in the first week of May. The plan is to finish the post production by the beginning of August, then have a “roll-out” at MIP in October.
Putting some model sheets, etc. up on the site, so you can see a little more of what the story is about. You can go to the gallery to check them out.
Kent B