Second Home Sketchbook

I remember first crawling around the odd geometric spaces and narrow gaps behind Symphony Hall‘s giant Klais organ and being amazed at the sheer number of pipes and the mechanics required to feed each one with air. These instruments are impressive enough from the front, but when you venture behind the organ case itself, you enter what resembles a climbing frame from the mind of a surrealist. It’s staggering what 6000 pipes actually look like where every pipe, linkage and functioning cantilever is hand-made to work independently. It’s fine when something like this appeals to your inner engineering geek, but it’s quite another to try and translate this impression to kids.

Mood board of storyboards, character turnarounds, explanatory diagrams and supporting educational material courtesy of THSH.

The script and its rhyming voice-over went through 24 drafts over the course of about 6 months, with another 15 sub-revisions in between. The brief had a number of educational targets in mind under the guise of being, ostensibly, a cartoon for kids. It had to explain the basic principles behind the instrument, the minutia of its manufacturing and how this relates to the music it produces. Above all, I wanted to give a sense of awe at the size of these things. It’s an overused phrase, but they really are the king of instruments.

Organ scholar James Luxton who advised during the early development stage, here seated at the remote console.

There’s a lot to squeeze in to a brief for a 5 minute film, and the principles are incredibly simple but strangely not that easy to get across as you can have a number of different starting points. What shall we use as an opening analogy? Should a pipe be like a whistle or a pan-pipe? Actually it’s both, and it’s also just like an empty bottle when you think about it. The film had to take these simple ideas and then give an insight into the sheer amount of engineering craft that comprise most pipe organs. Its worth pointing out that both Town Hall and Symphony Hall each have their own pipe organs. Initially we’d hoped to feature both, but conceded it was probably too much to squeeze into a short film. Of the two, the asymmetric design of Symphony Hall’s Klais organ struck me as the more interesting example to follow.

I initially had the idea for a rhyming scheme to keep the voiceover lyrical and poles apart from anything that resembled a droning ‘This is how an organ works…’ type of style. This was very much what Paul Keene and Katie Banks, who originally commissioned the piece, wanted to steer away from. The bare bones were there but it was far from being laureate material. Having been engrossed in the technical detail, I’d put in place certain characters and what I hoped were comedic interludes, but it had become bogged down in the technical explanation of the centre of the organ; the windchest. Enter Julie Boden, poet in residence at Symphony Hall, who took the voiceover part of the script (then at around draft number 15) and transformed it through several workings into something that scanned properly and gracefully.

'I think a giant robot's lungs may be the thing we need...'

We constantly had to revisit and question the analogies being used and the way the organ was being explained. Certain features like the organ stops were omitted from an early stage and we had to defer to the cartoon realm to segue between the basic similarities organ pipes share with whistles and organ pipes. Besides, the film was to serve as an introduction and accompaniment to the Science of Sound days, not usurp it by covering every piece of information. After more development discussions between Julie, Paul Keene, Georgina Biggs, Katy Woodford, Anna Long and myself, the important milestones of information were put in place. A handful of different viewpoints, perhaps, but these kinds of collaborations are made easier when everyone round the table has only got the best interests of the project at heart, whether coming from an educational, musical or visual perspective. I think the beauty of what Julie did with the voiceover is how closely it rings true with the original brief. Once inserted back into the original script, the visual story could take shape and gave us animators license to add a few more visual flourishes.

Assistant Animator Luke Sault. Much of the explanatory diagrams were hand drawn as paper cells with 5-6 frame boils. The characters also had this hand-rendered look achieved in Flash.

At this point, we were still aiming to deliver before the first performance on the 13th May 2011 so time was tight. Gerald Fitzgerald took care of the storyboarding and preliminary character designs. Louis Hudson took the lead with the Flash character animation with some beautiful character insertions courtesy of Natalie Bancroft, Ian Whittle, Chris Warren and Neil Webber with Eric Seow and Luke Sault in assistant roles. The look was always intended to be a colourful, slightly loose illustrative style that combined ‘diagram world’ with ‘character world’.

Lead Animator Louis Hudson at work on the main characters.

With a suitably warm, yet energetic voiceover courtesy of Lorna Laidlaw, a specially composed soundtrack from Rob and Arnie at Voodookazoo, mixed by John Catlow at Catlowsound, the film was ready to screen. The preview screening of the film worked rather well. The audience of some 500 children aged between 6-11 seemed engrossed. At the end, during Steven Spencer’s dynamic CG camera track from the inner workings of the organ to the front of the organ case, this incited a load of fingers pointing in the air – clearly recognising Symphony Hall in cartoon form. Strangely, the biggest chuckle came from the sound effect of the protuberance on the reed pipe – a ruler being twanged over a desk. It’s always the simplest things…

Natalie Bancroft's Octopus about to drop...

With thanks to all the animators, helpers and the fantastic staff at Town Hall Symphony Hall.

Watch the film here: