'DreamWorks Storyboarding', Director & Storyboard Artist, Simon Wells

0:09Jawad MirWelcome back everyone to another episode of Kingdom of Dreams podcast, the making of stories. I'm your host Jawad Mir. I know, I have been sort of off for a few days, four or five days again. I promise you this is not gonna happen again. Just been really busy with a project that I'm working on and then my next film, which I'll talk to you about next coming week. But today my guest is my repeat guest, who I've had probably the most amount of times on this podcast. A friend, a colleague, as well as an amazing storyboard artist and a storyteller, Simon Wells. I've had him in the past to talk about his film Time Machine, Balto, We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story, Prince of Egypt, and so many other things. But today we're just specifically talking about storyboarding, and in this episode he talks about the art of storyboarding, the process of it, and he also shows some of the most amazing storyboards that I have seen, from one of my favorite films, Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Simon Wells.

1:10Jawad MirYeah, let's talk about, your work. You wanted to do something different in terms of showing your storyboards and process.

1:15Simon WellsYeah, you know, we talked a lot about kind of, you know, airy-fairy e… ends of filmmaking and…

1:22Jawad MirYep

1:23Simon Wells... You know, the, what I actually do, you know, what pays the mortgage and what's put my kids through school and stuff, has been drawing pictures. I sit on a couch and I draw funny pictures for a living. And, you know, the seven-year-old part of me is as… amazed that somebody actually pays me to do this. You know, this, when I was seven, this would've been my dream job. You know, I just get to sit and draw all day and people give me money. So yeah. It, but the sort of the mechanics and the job of what is storyboarding, particularly for animation, 'cause I've done some storyboarding in live action and, that tends to be, it fulfills two functions in live action. One is it's kind of notes and ideas for the director, which the director may or may not follow. And so very often it's like, you know, coming up with ideas for shots that the director wouldn't have thought of themselves.

2:24Simon WellsOr it's there for kind of budgetary purposes, for doing visual effects work. A lot of, lot of the big visual effects movies, you know, you have to get some sort of estimate of what is involved in the shot. And so you storyboard it out and it's like, "Oh, okay, we've got a big, you know, huge gorilla, and we've got some airplanes and, you know, some explosions, and okay, that's gonna be three-quarters of a million dollars right there." You know. So I have friends who work in the live action storyboard world, which has been miserable over the last couple of years, by the way. The, you know, the lack of stuff getting green-lit has been painful. But anyway, so kind of what storyboard is for live action is, it tends to be kind of here, firstly, here is the script. Please illustrate the script. Sometimes you're in a position where they want additional visual gags and things like that.

3:26Simon WellsBut more often than not it's like, "Well, here's, here's the broad outline. Do this." in animation, you are much more involved in the ongoing writing process. Now, that has kind of two sides to it. One is it's great because you can actually get stuff that you came up with in the movie, and there are some times I've done sequences where there has, the brief has been like, you know, five lines long and, we haven't got any script here at all. Just go for it. For instance, oh, I did a couple of sequences in, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron that were like that, both the, hauling the train across the mountain and also the forest fire that follows it. There was no script. There was literally just,... And they w… also I did the forest fire before I did the train sequence, so I ended up having to, the forest fire had originally followed a different sequence, so there were a number of things I had to end up with.

4:33Simon WellsThe train sequence was not only can you somehow get, Spirit to escape from the chain gang that's hauling this train over the Sierras, also release all the other, horses, and also, oh, also Spirit has to realize what the train is gonna mean to his herd in the future. And also can he get a chain wrapped around his neck 'cause he's got a chain around his neck in the forest fire and we've already animated that. So it was a completely kind of open, make this up. You can actually, if you're interested, you can actually see that sequence. The storyboards are on the DVD of Spirit.

5:16Jawad MirYep

5:16Simon Wells... They actually did it as an extra. They cut it side by side with the final film…

5:21Jawad MirYeah

5:21Simon Wells... As one of the extras, which is kind of fun. It's the only time I know of that I, that's happened, at least it's only happened to me. And even recently I, on Croo… well, relatively recently, on the first Croods film, Chris and Kirk were writing the film, and we were kind of storyboarding stuff as they were writing. And they got to the third act and said, "Well, we have this whole sort of big, important moment when Grug, the father of the family, saves his entire family by flinging them across this bottomless gorge. And there's volcanoes going off and stuff, and, but obviously we don't want Grug to die. He's gotta have done this selfless act without thinking about his own life. But I don't know, maybe he should climb down the gorge and climb up the other side." And I said, "Yeah, but then it wasn't a bottomless gorge, was it?" And they said, "Well, no, you're right. Got any ideas?" It really was literally that open.

6:22Simon WellsAnd so the whole thing of Grug building the, this flying machine, actually was me going back through the movie trying to find things in the movie that I could in any way at all put together to help Grug get across the chasm. It went through many iterations and, Chris in particular is a genius at coming up with additional kind of gags and ideas. But, yeah, that fundamental let's make a flying machine, was like the only, the only way I could think of solving it, and it was... It came out of a completely open brief of like, "Have some ideas, please." so you get, you get that kind of thing, which is very rewarding. But you also, the downside of that is that sometimes you are, you try out an idea, or, you know, a whole sequence or, you know, a whole bunch of scenes, and then when it's put together and they put the whole movie together, they look at it and they go, "Yeah, no, not really the right thing."

7:36Simon WellsSo again, on, working with, Chris and Kirk on Croods 2 before they were moved off Croods 2 and Joel and Januel took it over, I did three completely different huge action sequences, that were the sort of the big action climax of the movie. And each one of them lasted one screening, and afterwards they came up with another idea. And so it's like, well, there's 800 to 1,000 panels that we're just throwing in the round file and moving on. So on the one hand, it's very rewarding in animation because you're involved in the creation of the movie, and although your voice is relatively small, you're a part of it and you're, you're part of seeing the development of how the story gets there. The downside is that you have to have, you know, a hide-like leather because, y… your stuff is gonna get thrown out.

8:41Simon WellsEven, you know, even the most experienced storyboard artist, I don't know, 90% of what you do gets thrown away, or gets reworked and reworked and reworked. And that's, that's probably the most painful part of the whole animation storyboard thing, is that, you may be doing the same sequence over and over and over again for a very long time. Brenda Chapman, for instance, just before she came and joined us at DreamWorks to do Prince of Egypt, she did the topsy-turvy sequence in Hunchback of Notre Dame…... Over and over for a year. Imagine having to listen to th… because the song didn't change. Wow. What happened in the sequence changed over and over, but the song was... So imagine spending an entire year having to listen to that song. I mean… That is crazy... I found it annoyingly repetitive even once during the movie, so I, you know... What it did to Brenda's brain, I have no idea.

9:42Simon WellsAnd, another example, I worked on, oh, Sinbad, the animated Sinbad that DreamWorks did. Yeah. And I was… Tim directed it. Yeah, Tim, yeah. And I was doing a sequence for the sea monster attack. And then, the movie Time Machine came up, so I went, "Sayonara, I'm off to direct a movie." And I finished, shooting, Time Machine, and then I was in editorial, you know, working with Wayne Worman, my editor, on putting the movie together. And at this point, running a bit short of money because, contrary to popular belief, you do not get paid a huge amount of money to direct movies. Certainly not when it's your first time out. So, I contacted DreamWorks and said, "Hey, have you got any storyboard work I could do while I'm... You know, 'cause I'm not full-time in edit." and, turned out, yes, they had.

10:44Simon WellsThey had the, sea monster attack sequence from Sinbad, need to do. It was a full year from when I had left it to when I came back and did it again. Wow. Oh, wow. Yeah. That is insane. Yeah, that, so that can happen. I mean, fortunately, I was not working on it for a year in between. But, and on, oh, what was it? Time Machine? Flushed Away. There was an opening sequence that was, you know, Roddy the rat on his own in his posh apartment in Kensington. And it was sort of establishing Roddy's kind of lonely life, luxurious but lonely life. And it had gone, it went through a whole bunch of different versions where he had a couple of hamster butlers, and then there was gonna be a cocktail party with lots of other rats. And the idea was that then when they came back, having been down in the sewer all, there'd be another cocktail party that, despised him for now being all kind of ghastly.

11:52Simon WellsSo it went through a lot of different iterations, and I did most of them. And a lot of gags of, you know, preparing food for the cocktail party. And I got to realize, when I saw it in the screenings of movie, I said to the guys, "This sequence shouldn't be in the movie. There's no emotional change that happens. It's, it's establishing an idea, but you could establish the idea in three or four shots. So I recommend cutting sequence 100 out of the movie." And they go, "Yes, I see." And then it'll come to launching, artists back into doing stuff on the movie, and they'd launch me back onto sequence 100 again. And so there's a sort of, okay, there's a separation of responsibilities. There's the, my responsibilities as a filmmaker, giving notes and advice, and then there's my responsibilities as a storyboard artist.

12:53Simon WellsAnd essentially, when I'm a storyboard artist it's like, "Yep, what do you need doing? I will do that. No matter how wrong I think the idea is, I will make it work to the best of my abilities." and then there's the, you know, after a screening you want my opinion as a filmmaker. It's like, "Well, that sequence, is pointless."

13:12Jawad MirYeah.

13:12Simon Wells"It's brilliantly done, but it's pointless." And, it's interesting that in the final movie it ends up being the title sequence, so there's all the…

13:20Jawad MirOh, wow

13:20Simon Wells... All the lead titles run over it. It's, it's not a bad sequence, and Tom McGrath came in and came up with some really great gags and stuff, but, yeah. It doesn't really need to be in the movie as such.

13:36Jawad MirYeah.

13:36Simon WellsBut it's…

13:37Jawad MirNo, it's, it's a tedious process, right? Like, doing storyboards. And you were talking about, Time Machine, and I remember... Just give me a second. I found something the other day.

13:46Simon WellsOh, gosh.

13:50Jawad MirWhere is it? There we go. Good old days. This is the Starlog magazine.

13:59Simon WellsOh, yeah. Yeah, I think I have a copy of that. Yep.

14:04Jawad MirYeah. And I was going through it. I'm like, "Oh." You know, then there's a, they've obviously quoted you in there, and you, I think you were interviewed in there for... But that was kinda cool, when you were talking about Time Machine and, how that kinda came up, but. But go, you know, going back to storyboards, one, do you think working on Time Machine, had you not been a storyboard artist, did it help you in any way? Did it not? Did it help you in a negative way or a positive way?

14:32Jawad MirWas there any…

14:33Simon WellsThe interesting thing about Time Machine as an experience was that, I, you know, I thought, I thought, "I'm the shit. I've, I've directed on four movies now."

14:43Jawad MirYeah.

14:43Simon Wells"I know what I'm doing." And in a sense, I did know what I was doing in terms of staging shots, how shots were gonna cut together. You know, I remember going into the, to see Wayne when he was cutting the first bits of the movie together. We shot the movie almost in chronological order, which was interesting.

15:05Simon WellsBut he started shooting, he started putting together stuff that actually ended up being cut out of the movie that was, Alexander Hartdegen, teaching a class in college.

15:15Jawad MirRight.

15:15Simon WellsAnd, I saw his initial cut, and I said, "Wow, that was exactly what I was thinking. You know, I haven't been through and talked to you about how I was gonna cut it together." And he said, "Well, it was obvious from the way you shot it, that's how you wanted it cut together." so, I understood how to, how to construct movies. I didn't understand how to write movies.

15:39Simon WellsAnd, th… I think there's quite a lot wrong with Time Machine in terms of story construction, and I didn't know what to do about it. And, but it's funny, in terms of the actual shooting day, it's funny, I storyboarded, I thumbnail storyboarded, like, everything in the movie. And then I'd come on set, and once I was on set and working with the actors, I'd realize, "Oh, I've got a whole bunch of new ideas and better ways of staging stuff." And the actors wanted to, you know, they'd wanna do this, and so, "Oh, okay, that's a good idea." So I ended up, you know, while the actors are off getting their, you know, final touches, makeup and stuff, done, I'd sit and draw thumbnails of the material we're gonna shoot today. "Here's the, you know, 12, 13 shots I wanna try and get today." And, m… my DP, Don McAlpine, loved that, and actually the whole crew loved it 'cause it's like, "Well, here's, here's the task ahead.

16:40Simon WellsWe can all see what the shots are gonna be." And, later on in shooting, Don actually came to me and said, "Look, every other director I've ever worked with, I've told them to prepare as much as possible. With you, I'm actually telling you the opposite. Don't." "Because when you come on set, you can clearly see how to construct the shots. Don't bother trying to think it out. You're wasting your energy trying to think it out in advance. Come on set and just do it." but even then I was, I was drawing what the shots were gonna be. I'd go around with, a lens and sort of see what the angles could be. But then I'd sketch the drawings of what those shots would be.

17:24Jawad MirWow

17:24Simon Wells... So yeah, the storyboard, helped me enormously as a visual thinker. And even when we did, when we did Mars Needs Mums, I actually didn't storyboard that. I had a, I had a couple of storyboard artists, do some stuff that was useful mostly in terms of working out what stunts we were gonna have to rig. And I was aware, when I was kind of writing and planning the scenes of how I was gonna shoot it in terms of what's the screen direction and what kind of shots we're gonna create. So, like the design of the sets was very much with all of that in mind, but I didn't actually go through and do a shot breakdown as such. It's interesting. My, process over the years has changed a great deal.

18:27Simon WellsWhen I, when I started off, I was thumbnailing, doing little tiny drawings in the corners of stuff. So for instance, I've got the, of the books I did on Balto, I have extensive pages and pages of thumbnails. A friend of mine, at work, Genevieve, just borrowed, them and actually, she digitized the whole lot, so I now have the whole thing, on... Actually, I wonder if I've, wonder if I've got it easily to hand here.

18:59Jawad MirOh, that would be amazing. I'd love to see those.

19:01Simon WellsLet's see if I can find it. Is it still in... No documents. Is it in Balto there? Balto thumbnails. Yeah, here we go.

19:13Jawad MirLet me try to

19:14Simon WellsYeah. Okay. So I can share s… share a screen. Let me, let me just,... Wait a minute. Here we go. Share. Okay. Share. There's desktop. There's Windows. Oh, and I better open this up first and then... Oh, wait. I'll s… I'll just share screen. Desktop one. Yeah, share that. Yeah. So, this was ideas of, you know, Rose… Grandma Rosie and the kid and the dog in the park.

19:49Jawad MirWow

19:49Simon Wells... And some of the, you know, more sketched out and some of them…

19:53Jawad MirGo back. I love that park one, the one that you did

19:56Simon WellsOh, yeah. That was the…

19:57Jawad MirThat has so much depth to it. That's amazing, man.

20:01Simon WellsAnd then sort of…

20:01Jawad MirAnd this is way back in the '90s.

20:04Simon WellsYeah. So, and,... Yeah, so I was... And then we actually went and sort of checked out what the location was and figured out kinda what the camera angles were gonna be. Is... Okay. Anyway. So lots of, lots of dif… oh, the weather fore… forecast for the day we shot. So then if I keep on going, yeah, then we get into kinda stuff that was, things for the movie. And some of it, as you can see, is very scribbly rough. Those are Hans…

20:45Jawad MirOh

20:45Simon Wells... I think Hans Bacher did those, and then some pictures of ac… the actual, period in Gnome. So ideas for sort of the opening sequence became a whole sort of... You may recognize some of this stuff that actually did end up…

21:02Jawad MirYeah, I do

21:02Simon Wells... Like that in the, in the movie. Some of it's very scribbly and some of it's more carefully drawn. And what I would do is I'd, I'd, I'd thumbnail this stuff like that, and then I'd, I'd redraw as, kind of, I don't know, story sketches about this size. And a thing over the years that I realized, and, you know, some kinda like scene planning and stuff, where it's, okay, it's gonna be a down shot that then tilts up, 'cause this is very much in the days of still doing stuff in the, traditional 2D way. So you had to actually think out, how mechanically how things were gonna work. And I also come from knowing a certain amount about layout. So I would, I could actually do layout planning as well. So here's a... I think this is... I'm just trying to…

22:01Jawad MirThere should…

22:02Simon WellsYeah. I think…

22:02Jawad MirThere should... There's a, there's a button on the top that's, that rotates it

22:05Simon WellsYeah, I know. It can, it can turn... Oh, here we go. Yeah.

22:08Jawad MirOkay.

22:08Simon WellsI was going... I knew there was a larger one coming up, but let me,... Oh, actually, no. I'd have to open it in

22:15Jawad MirSure, no problem

22:16Simon Wells... In some finder to turn it, spin it around. What was it?

22:22Jawad MirThere's an icon at the bo… on the top if you go beside…

22:25Simon WellsYeah, it…

22:25Jawad Mir... The marker right... Go right, go right…

22:27Simon WellsYeah, right. There

22:27Jawad Mir... Right there, yeah.

22:28Simon WellsThere we go. Yeah.

22:33Jawad MirWow.

22:35Simon WellsSo yeah, as you can see, I'd stick this... It was early cut and paste. I'm literally sticking things together with sticky tape. And

22:48Jawad MirYou know what you should do, Simon? There's apps that

22:50Simon WellsOh, yeah. So there is actually... Yeah, the whole thing actually joins together. It's a crazy long... I'm sorry, what were you gonna say?

22:57Jawad MirI was gonna say there are these apps now that actually takes a photograph of whatever you were taking the photograph of, like a document or a photo… ... And it converts into, like, a proper, like, a scanned image. So it's not like an actual... It's, it's so that way you have everything stored for yourself, digitized, not as a photograph, but in an actual s… it would look like an actual storyboard that was scanned…

23:21Simon WellsOh

23:21Jawad Mir... Into a computer. Just a thought.

23:24Simon WellsYeah. I don't know if I can be bothered. It's a lot. I mean, I was amazed that Genevieve took the time to do all of this. She, bless her, she's, she's a big fan of the original film. She, by the way, a very good storyboard artist herself, and just won, an Annie for character design on Wild Robot. So I feel very, privileged that I have fans like that. But yeah, he… here's a whole long m… I can't remember if, how much of this actually ended up in the movie, but traveling across and through

23:58Jawad MirGood Lord, man.

23:59Simon WellsBut yeah, so anyway, yeah, I, the, yeah, there's, there's so much of this stuff. I'm, I'm not gonna bore you. It just, like, it goes on and on. And, so yeah, I went through and planned everything out. And what I realized,... Hang on. How do I stop sharing?

24:19Jawad MirIt's just the same button at the bottom

24:20Simon Wells... Option. Here we go. Yeah.

24:21Jawad MirThere you go.

24:21Simon WellsRight. So then what I realized at a certain point was, wait a minute. I'm, I'm doing these thumbnails, and sometimes the composition of the thumbnail would look better than the story sketch. And you realize, oh, wait a minute. I'm, when I'm drawing larger, I'm not as aware of the sort of the fundamental… Division of the screen as I am… when I'm doing the thumbnail, I'm, I'm thinking just in terms of pattern, and when I'm drawing the story sketch, I'm too involved in the detail to be looking clearly at the pattern. So then I went into a thing where I'd take the thumbnails, and I'd blow them up because this was the, this was the early days of having, photocopiers that had the ability…

25:02Simon Wells... To do, like, you know, 400% enlargement kind of thing. So I would, blow up the thumbnails, and then I'd clean up… I'd trace off the thumbnail so that I kept the composition that was right in the thumbnail. And then it occurred to me, and I think this was, So for instance, when I did some boarding on, Prince of Egypt because I did some boarding there. I also boarded on, several of the other DreamWorks movies while Prince of Egypt was going on. I boarded a sequence in Antz and a sequence or two in El Dorado. But, I came to realize, wait a minute, I can, I can draw pretty detailed quite small. And so I developed these sheets that were, basically the thumbnail was exactly, one… it was, it was at 400%, so it was one quarter of the size of a final panel, so it was about EA big. And back then my eyesight and fine motor control were a lot better.

26:07Simon WellsAnd so I would draw, story sketches, directly at that size and then just blow them up. And actually I can… Why don't I, dig out an example of that?

26:23Jawad MirThat'd be super cool.

26:25Simon WellsHang on a second. It's somewhere. I got… So, yeah, all right. So, I'll do the same thing. I'll just share the screen. So here, for instance, is the sequence in Prince of Egypt where, Ramesses…

26:53Jawad MirYeah

26:53Simon Wells... Son has died. Actually, I don't know whether I drew these or I think,.. Oh, man. It's gone out of my head. He was our storyboard trainee, and he went on to, direct, for instance, The Emoji Movie. He also directed, oh, he directed a few movies. Damn, I…

27:20Jawad MirTo-To-Tony? Tony Leon…

27:22Simon WellsOh, Tony Leondis. Thank you.

27:23Jawad MirYeah.

27:23Simon WellsTony Leondis. Yeah. So, I don't know if these drawings are actually by Tony Leondis, kind of with my, fairly detailed direction and suggestion. But as you can see, it's, these are fairly large story sketches. And then…

27:46Jawad MirWow, these are, these are insane, Simon.

27:50Simon WellsWell, th-this is…

27:51Jawad MirI mean…

27:51Simon WellsThese last ones are definitely mine. But, so, yeah, I mean, it was… these were… part of the deal was, you know, making sure we generated the atmosphere of the scene as well, which by the way was stolen wholesale from, oh, Citizen Kane. There's the library sequence in Citizen Kane, which the lighting's exactly like this, and it's, you know, so we just stole that aesthetic right away. But anyway, so, I do those, and then, yeah, so as I say, it occurred to me that the thing to do would be to, actually just draw the thumbnails directly at the size that, the, you know, at this small size and then just blow them up. So, this is an example. This is from Spirit Stallion of Cimarron, which, sorry, hang on a second.

28:53Simon WellsOkay, I'll… actually I'll, I'll, I'll pitch this thing through because

28:57Jawad MirSure

28:57Simon Wells... It sort of shows the process. So it starts off with hands pulling on a rope, and we reveal, more of the troopers pulling on ropes, and now we reveal that, Spirit is being hauled in, and we dolly backwards as he's hauled forwards into the crosstrees, and we see ropes tightening up, pull focus to Spirit, who pulls at the rope, but he can't get free. And then one of the troopers shouts out, "Okay, Murphy, got another one for you." And Spirit bites at him. He goes, "Whoa, he's a wild one." And Murphy emerges out of the fire, wiping his hand on an oily rag and says something to the effect of, "We'll see how wild he is when I'm finished with him." And he pulls out his, shearing, blades.

29:44Jawad MirOh, yeah.

29:44Simon WellsAnd we see Spirit's reaction as he closes in. Then he starts to cut. Spirit bites at him. He staggers back. Spirit angry. He says, "Okay, you wanna fight, do you?" Now we see him cutting the hair, and we wonder why. And he throws the hair down, and that reveals that he's tied Spirit's nose up, in a bag. Spirit's pulling at it, and crunch, crunches, Murphy's hand. He staggers back holding his hand. Spirit's angry. Now we see ha-hands hauling on the ropes, and Spirit winces in pain. And we reveal that what he's doing is, what they're doing is tying him into the crosstrees so he can't move his body either. Now he's finishing with the cutting the hair. Now we go to pulling the, hoof up to a paring knife to prepare the hoof for, the, putting on shoes. And, he's working away.

30:45Simon WellsSpirit's biding his time, and then suddenly, whoop, the, hoof goes out, Murphy spins round to see, bang, Spirit hits him. He face plants straight into camera. S… Murphy's angry, Spirit's angry. Once again, the hands pulling tight, and, yeah, making sure that's good and tight. So now we've got him literally hogtied. His face is tied, his body's tied, his hoof is tied up so that Murphy can work away putting a shoe on, duh. And Spirit's biding his time, and then he raises a hoof up and, "Murphy, look out." Murphy looks up, bang, the hoof comes straight into him. Wham, Murphy goes down, and one of his troopers tries to help him up. Spirit's there furious, Murphy's there furious. Now every leg's getting tied up. Tie. And l… literally the horse cannot move, and there's a whole sound thing where the horse's, mouth is kind of inside the bag going, "Ugh."

31:56Simon WellsAnd at the same time we're seeing Murphy pumping the bellows. And then, and they're f… you know, closing in, both of them kind of looking at each other, and then Murphy brings up the brand, which is glowing, brings it into camera, and he's walking past Spirit, and now Spirit's actually scared. And then Murphy turns, and with a grin he launches in. Spirit reacts in pain. There's a whole thing with Spirit struggling in the cross trees, and the troopers react, and Murphy's, like, forcing the brand into his side. And then Spirit pulls his face free, comes up, and there's a moment where they look at each other and Murphy reconsiders many of his life choices. And then wham, in comes Spirit and knocks him down. He goes down like a sack of potatoes, and the troopers look on kind of, "Huh, okay."

32:59Simon WellsAnd the horse is there, like no one's gonna fuck with that horse. And I th… I actually think the troopers say something like, "Okay, maybe you wanna round up some guys and take him to the stables?" And we hear a voice... Oh yeah, here it is. "Corporal, round up some volunteers and take this animal to the stables." And then we hear, "Not the stables, gentlemen, the post." although, I think it's... Oh, it was actually this, th… that's the whole thing put together. But, it's a line like the post three... Oh, here it is at the, at the very end you can see, Yeah... The post. Three days, no food or water, and the colonel moves out. So, I, the reason I sort of keep this as a, as an example, partly it's 'cause, like, this was, this was all drawn, at about two and a half inches across. These are tiny drawings, and it's all done pencil, so all the shading is just sort of side of the pencil.

33:59Simon WellsBut I also, I use it as ex… as an example when I do talks of kinda planning out. So there were, there were a number of challenges with this as a sequence, which some of it does get solved in layout sometimes, but I come from the school of I wanna solve it all myself. I wanna present the directors with a piece of filmmaking which they can then adapt and change if they want, but it works as a piece of filmmaking in itself. So there were a number of, a number of challenges with this. One is that, it's inherently a very static scene because the horse can't go anywhere, and in fact the whole point of the scene is the horse is more and more trapped. And as he gets more and more trapped, he actually still manages to win. So that was kind of the overarching brief. And then the other problem was this takes place over quite a long period of time, and, there's a thing which, in filmmaking you talk about shoe leather.

35:06Simon WellsIt is the time it takes to get from one place to another. And, like, sometimes, you know, if you're in the West Wing, you fill that up with dialogue. You basically take a dialogue scene and say, "I'm not gonna just sit at a desk and talk. We're gonna walk, do a walk and talk. We're gonna, we're gonna move somewhere while we're…, ... While we're talking, and that takes us to the next scene." But there are other things where, and first time I became really aware of it is, in the end of, the first Back to the Future when, Marty has discovered that his time has changed and now he's got that tr… terrific truck, and Biff is, like, you know, crawling and saying, "I just put a, an extra coat of polish on for you." and then the DeLorean shows up and crashes into the cans and stuff. And if you actually watch the scene, okay, the doc jumps out and he comes running over to Marty and says, "We gotta go back and, you know, do something about your kids."

36:08Simon WellsAnd there is, for instance, a moment where the doc is standing with Marty right there by the, by Marty's truck by the garage, and then you cut straight to the lid of the trash can being opened, and Doc takes out a banana peel and puts it into the Mr. Fusion. And I, it's a very small thing and, but they've taken out the 10 steps it takes to get from the garage to the trash can. You're cutting ahead to the next important thing, which is the trash can opening. Yeah. And so when you have time that's gonna pass, finding ways of, like, jumping ahead to the next thing is sort of an important thing. So I, with this sequence I thought, "Okay, let's…" Let's have kind of a motif where I'm gonna, go into a close-up, and i… in general a close-up of hands.

37:09Simon WellsSo here we see, you know, the hands pulling on ropes, and we're doing this, and then cutting ahead. Now we're immediately seeing the ropes tied. We didn't see them, like, doing the business of getting the ropes around. Yeah. We just go straight, bang, to ropes being tied. And then we got some stuff happens, and this goes on, and then we go into a close-up of hands cutting, and we reveal what has happened in the interve… intervening, time. Then there's another violent moment, and then we see hands pulling on ropes again, and reveal. So each time there's kind of a close-up and a mystery which is solved a couple of shots later when you reveal what the, what the answer is. Right. So th… this happens all the way through the sequence. I'm cutting ahead to, like, you know, we're going straight from the haircut and angry Spirit to pulling up the hoof.

38:16Simon WellsWe've taken out a great chunk of time in between. So all the way through the sequence I'm, I'm doing that. Bang, he goes down again. And after a confrontation, again, the hands pulling the, things, and it's reveal again what the setup is w… and so on. The other, the other problem with this sequence was, and this is, this is really tricky in terms of Spirit was still a 2D movie. It was still hand drawn on painted backgrounds. In a 3D movie, in, like, 3D animation, you can move the camera around in a fluid way, the way you can in live action. Right. In fact, one of the problems with 3D animation is the tendency to move the camera too much. In 2D animation you can pan and you can tilt and you can zoom in and out, but, if you wanna try and do anything more than that, you're into using multi-planes and so on. And so the problem is, how are we gonna make a sort of probably three-minute sequence where the horse literally cannot move?

39:26Simon WellsSo, a… and you don't wanna just be shooting the same angles on the horse all the time. So, what I do in this, and I'll go to the big overview, is when we first come in, there's this concept of proscenium, which is kind of what is the, what are the angles you're shooting a scene from? It's a thing which, generally you have a line of action, you have a side that you're shooting from. So when characters are talking, there's one character on this side looking this way, and the other character on this side looking that way, so that you're never confused when you cut back and forth between characters. Broadly speaking, there's a line between your two main characters, and you're shooting from this side of the line for one character and this side of the line for the other. Right. And you're establishing shots, and everything stays on the one side of the line. And so when we first come in here, we are, the line of action is broadly speaking across the front of the,..

40:30Simon WellsWell, actually it's probably along the axis of the horse, so we are at the, as it were, the left-hand end of the line, looking down along at the horse, and then down here we're on the side of the horse. But we've fairly clearly established our line of action is kind of along the horse. Yeah. And then when out comes Murphy, he's moving left to right. We know he's going towards the horse, and, you know, when the horse bites at Murphy, he's going right to left, and we know who he's biting. So as that progresses though, I wanted to move around. So here we've now moved around where we're actually, we've gone around to the left of that live… line of action, and in fact our, if we think about the axis of the horse, the horse is now facing from left to right. The h… the horse's head is at the right-hand end of things. And we've moved around onto this side of the horse, which I've done through a bunch of neutral shots along the way.

41:30Simon WellsOf course it's also, you know, v… we know the horse is in one place, so it's not really confusing. But I've now established and all the shots now operate from, this angle looking along the side of the horse, and even round to sort of behind the horse's haunches, which helps make the scene less static because we've moved around the animal rather than staying always in the same... I could have staged these shots from the same side of the horse…, ... So that everything was with the horse facing from, right to l… well, you know, the horse body being right to left. But it makes for more interesting variety to have found ways of moving the horse around., ... And ultimately, yeah, Murphy, you know, he goes down, bang, left to right, and that takes us to, the colonel. So that was a sort of an active thing. There's a, by the way, a small point that somebody came up with.

42:33Simon WellsI pitched it recently, for some events and, in the questions and answers afterwards there was a storyboard artist who said, "Yeah, I really like the way you ended up with the open hand at the end," 'cause you'd had this, like these gripping hands, these hands doing things and, you know, wielding knives and cutting things and pulling on ropes, and then at the end the hand falls impotent and open at the end. And I thought, "That's really smart. I wish I actually thought of that." It was entirely kind of like, "Oh, I just thought, you know, blump, you know, the hand falls down at the end, it's gonna look cool." I hadn't thought in terms of, ah, yeah, that would be a really clever symbol.

43:14Jawad MirYeah

43:16Simon WellsSo anyway, that's a sort of, you know, larger compositional tool that goes on through this. And then there's also, there's a thing that I do. I… I'm a big believer in kind of leading the eye around the frame so that you are already looking in the right place when you cut from one shot…

43:36Jawad MirYeah

43:36Simon Wells... To another. So, an example of that is, right when Murphy comes out with the blade, he comes out with his shearing knives, and it takes us straight to, the horse's… ... Eyes. It's in the same part of the screen. And indeed, you know, I'm deliberately angling the blades towards the horse's eyes, to make it more threatening. So you know, and also, you know, even though I'm pulling back, I'm keeping the horse in the same place in frame. And indeed, where the bite happens and where, specifically where Murphy is dropping the blade occurs in the same place in frame so that your eyes are right there at the impact point. And when the cut happens, your eyes are still looking, on the very next frame, your eyes are still looking in the same place, so you catch that small detail of the blades being dropped.

44:46Jawad MirYeah

44:46Simon Wells... It's a thing which I remember, oh, God, a really smart layout artist, Armen Melkonian, did a beautiful breakdown of, the chase sequence in, Terminator 2, the chase that takes place in the LA River, the…

45:02Simon Wells... Big concrete, drain that we call…

45:05Jawad MirThe truck

45:05Simon Wells... The LA River.

45:06Jawad MirYeah. Yeah.

45:06Simon WellsAnd the truck chasing after the kid on the motorbike. And Armen went through and he printed the l… first and last frame of every single shot, and then laid them out in a column. And it was amazing because, Cameron had cut it together. He shot it, but then cut it together in such a way that he's leading your eye around the screen. And if he's got a shot where something's gonna happen, like right up here, I don't know if you can still see me, right up here…

45:34Jawad MirYeah, I can

45:34Simon Wells... In the corner of the screen.

45:35Jawad MirI can, yeah.

45:36Simon WellsHe'll make sure that the action in the preceding shot has taken you over to that side so your eye is already there. One of the interesting things with the advent of 3D, you know, spec… spectrographic, whatever it is, you know, 3D movies, is you have to think not only in terms of where on the screen the eye is, but also actually what the depth, sorry, like that. Because where your eye is focused, is necessary too. You actually have to be thinking in terms of leaving the eye in the right place for where the next shot's coming in three dimensions. 'cause otherwise it takes the viewer just a micro amount of time, but it's about five or six frames they lose of the incoming shot, which is, you know, it's quarter of a second or a fifth of a second they just simply don't see.

46:37Simon WellsBut if you can, have the eye brought to the right place in screen, they will catch the thing in the first couple of frames of the, of the shot, and you can actually then cut your whole thing much tighter, but you won't be confused.

46:54Jawad MirYeah

46:54Simon Wells... One of the things that Cameron is incredibly good at doing, I admire Jim Cameron's action sequences because he can make something that cuts very fast, but you are never confused about who's where, what's happening. E… even though sometimes the shots, if you look at the individual shots, it's just like this is a blur of action. You know it's somebody's arm, and you know what they're impacting, and it's very impressive. And there are other directors who they have a jumble of shots, and the shots are all individually terrific, but it's harder to see what's gone on. And y… you know, you have to kind of wait for the dust to settle, and then you go, "Oh, okay, that person's on the floor, and that person's still standing." And, i… it's, it's much harder to follow, and a lot of that is to do with the shots are individually great, but they haven't been conceived to run one to the next as a sequence, and they haven't been cut together in a way that leads the eye around.

47:58Simon WellsSo, I'm very much a believer in that sort of, bringing the eye around places. So you know, again, here, for instance, you can see that in the wide shot and then in the close-up…

48:13Jawad MirYeah

48:13Simon Wells... The important thing is happening in exactly the same place…

48:16Jawad MirSame place

48:16Simon Wells... In the frame. And indeed, when we then cut to Murphy falling down, we're on that side of the screen to see him fall.

48:26Jawad MirIt's, another director who does it really good, because his shots are way more faster cut and they work, Michael Bay, I think.

48:34Simon WellsActually, Michael Bay, I would say is somebody who doesn't tend to have his shots…

48:39Jawad MirYou don't think so?

48:40Simon Wells... Mean a lot together. No, I'm, I, y… you know, that's a little unfair. Some of the, some of his later films more so, but I, he, my feeling is a lot of his action scenes were, "Here's a flurry of action, and then see what happens when the dust settles," rather than it leading me through the business. Anyway…

48:59Jawad MirBut what you just… What you just demonstrated is ph… ph… phenomenal. Like, that's super cool, like how your eye…

49:04Simon WellsOh, thank you

49:04Jawad Mir... Follows the action.

49:05Simon WellsYeah, well, that's, that's sort of, yeah, it's a, it's a principle. I'm… I am generally a sort of, I want to do cinematography which whilst it is, it's good cinematography, I kinda want to be as invisible as possible. And yeah, you know, you're using close-ups and you're trying to compose, you know, fancy shots like this, you know, an angle like this is there because you can get to see the action and his reaction at the same time because we're looking up into his face. But, by and large, I don't try and do flashy cinematography for cinematography's sake. It's always in aid of, in the purpose of the telling of the story. I…

49:49Jawad MirYeah

49:49Simon Wells... I, you know, having trained under Spielberg and Zemeckis, they're both masters of doing actually incredibly clever staging, but the staging is always in the interest of, like, how can I tell the story? And sometimes it's in the interest of how can I get, you know, close-ups and long shots in the same shot without having to do new setups, you know, by having my characters run up into a close-up and then run away into a long shot. But, yeah, I like, I like it to be something where you're not aware of the camera. The camera is part of the storytelling, but you as the viewer aren't going, "Oh gosh, that was a pretty shot," or, you know…

50:33Jawad MirYeah

50:33Simon Wells... "Oh, isn't that clever?" You know?

50:36Jawad MirYeah. I agree with that because I was of that mind, I would say probably 12 years ago, 13 years ago, like the technicality of things, and I realized making films and directing films and how important it is not to think about that. And sometimes I'm in that disagreement with my DP, 'cause you know, DPs, it's all about the image, right? And…

51:00Simon WellsYeah, they're trying to find a nice shot, and yeah

51:02Jawad MirRight

51:02Simon Wells... They're, they're, yeah.

51:05Jawad MirSo at the end of the day, I mean, you look at Blair Witch Project, you know, it, probably one of the most profitable movies ever made and it was shot on a camcorder. I mean, you can argue it was…

51:13Simon WellsWell, and not shot by the DP either

51:16Jawad MirYeah

51:16Simon Wells... It was shot by the actors.

51:17Jawad MirYeah, actors, exactly.

51:19Simon WellsYeah.

51:19Jawad MirSo it's…

51:19Simon WellsYeah, actually, I knew the producer of Blair Witch for a while. I was gonna, develop a project with him. And, he said they actually had, like half the movie was the preparation stuff that they'd shot. You know, the very first like five minutes of movie is shot like a traditional movie.

51:37Jawad MirYeah.

51:37Simon WellsAnd they actually had a lot more of that, but the moment they started getting the, putting the footage together that the actors had shot, which was literally that was an experiment. They thought, "Let's, let's try out just, like, giving the actors a camcorder and not, like, directing the actors. We'll just leave them notes." And so each actor had an envelope at the beginning of the day which told them something about what they were supposed to do. But the production crew never went near them, and they tried it out as an experiment, and it worked so well, they just said, "Well, this is the movie. You know, we just gotta shoot the whole movie like this. This is

52:17Jawad MirYeah

52:17Simon Wells... You know." so yeah, and it works because it is so visceral and immediate and, yeah, I find it hard to watch Blair Witch, to be honest, because it's all such…

52:31Jawad MirYeah

52:31Simon Wells... Shaky.

52:32Jawad MirYeah.

52:32Simon WellsI get motion sickness rather easily, and that just knocks me over. But yeah.

52:39Jawad MirBut…

52:39Simon WellsI get very frustrated when, for instance, you know, you have a handheld camera or a Steadicam camera and, I can't remember what the movie was, but there was some movie where there's this guy and he's running along and he's getting shot at, and he dives behind, you know, some bit of wall or something, and he's getting shot at. But we're a Steadicam on the other side of the wall looking at him being shot at, and it's like we're getting shot at. We're the s… you know, because it's a Steadicam, you're kind of aware of yourself being that camera. And so it's completely counterproductive. Now you have this feeling like I'm being shot in the back of the head now, 'cause I'm standing there looking at a guy who's, who's clearly, you know, hiding behind a wall to avoid being shot. So if I'm the Steadicam, I must be being shot. It's the danger with those kind of techniques which are, they're sort of conscious camera.

53:42Jawad MirYeah.

53:43Simon WellsYou know?

53:43Jawad MirYeah.

53:44Simon WellsAnd sometimes conscious camera's really good. If we were Steadicam behind that guy, diving down behind the wall with him, then weirdly you'd be less knocked out of the movie because you're with him experientially. But if you are using that sort of, you know, subjective camera, a camera that implies a person's point of view, now, you're no longer obeying the laws of the reality of the movie. So yeah, it's, I, by and large, I like, I like to not be aware of... I mean, yes, every now and again it's really great to have, like, a beauty shot.

54:32Jawad MirYeah.

54:32Simon WellsIt's like, "Isn't that pretty? Isn't that great?" And well-lit scenes are, you know, and getting the right shot, and nicely composed shots, you know. Citizen Kane, the whole thing is fantastically well-composed shots, but it's not a movie where you're going, "Ooh, look at the camera work."

54:54Jawad MirYeah. No, it's true. And I, you know, it, to kinda just wrap things up with Blair Witch, I think one of the things that I learned, not when it came out when I saw it, I think maybe 10 years after, is that how important is sound in film Visually…

55:11Simon WellsOh, yeah

55:12Jawad Mir... Not, you know, audience can forgive bad quality. I mean, but they cannot forgive bad sound, right? Like, sound…

55:17Simon WellsNo, it's…

55:17Jawad Mir... Is the epitome of everything.

55:19Simon WellsIt actually very interesting. I keep coming back to Citizen Kane, but I actually saw a reissue of Citizen Kane recently where they had, they'd done a beautiful job of making the images as good as they could be. But man, the sound was horrible. I mean, they'd, they'd, they'd reworked it for modern cinemas and stuff, but it was squawky and penetrating and at the same time kind of muddy. And yeah, it was really hard to watch. And by contrast, one of the things that we do, particularly in animation, is to build animatics of sequences. So the storyboards I just showed would actually be cut together with sound, voices, music. And, doing a good sound job, I learned when we were, when we were at Amblimation, we, I'd never pitch a sequence. We would always cut stuff together and then send videos to Spielberg to get his notes.

56:24Simon WellsAnd so we got very adept at building these animatics. And spending that extra time getting the sound right, Nick Fletcher used to do an amazing job… ... Considering he was working with, like a three channel, mixer on a Steenbeck, and somehow he managed to get these really complex mixes. This was before the advent of Avid.

56:48Jawad MirRight.

56:48Simon WellsThe moment Avid came out, we im… we jumped on that because that was fantastic. The quality of what we could make just leapt up enormously the moment we had Avid, 'cause of course you got all the audio, all the audio channels, and you can mix things and tweak things and set... You know, the early stuff, we were, poor old Nick was live mixing as he was recording it, you know…... Bouncing it down onto a, onto a channel. So, but yeah, getting the audio on those animatics was half the battle of selling the thing, is amazing. You've got good audio, you can have pretty crummy drawings, and it still, it still really sells.