My reaction:
Wow. It's fascinating. Just 17 minutes of fascinating. The quality is impeccable, and it REALLY shows you how they made the film, how some of the difficult effects were planned.
With this quality it's the kind of thing you would pray to see on an official DVD release!
Some of it is timing tests, using cutouts to see how difficult effects in, say, the war machine scene would be planned. There isn't a lot of character animation, but what's there is very interesting. There are even snippets of the enchanted prince and the Thief on springs.
I'll be spreading this around - it would actually make nice DVD menus too, to tell the truth.
There's actually a couple of little things here I can use in my edit itself. Very little, but they're in there. There's a bit of Zigzag saying "for breakfast, you'll have cobbler" ... and then shots of the staircase ... Zigzag and Phido aren't on the staircase there so I'll have to fiddle with it, but certainly usable stuff there. There's also a pencil test of an overhead shot of Zigzag and Tack on the battlefield, and that's a shot which is just a storyboard in the workprint. Brief but it's in there.
Such artistry. This was gold. Thanks so much to the sender.
Eddie Bowers, who sent me SLP copies of his copies of things YEARS ago, which got me interested in The Thief in the first place, has now actually lent me his original SP tapes of things.
Most notably, this gives me a better copy of Animating Art.
And Chris Sobieniak has lent me his tape of various Richard Williams commercials.
All this came today. It was a good day.
The edit is going well. I've managed to do a lot of new compositing effects and fix all the old ones. The combinations of workprint and finished footage in the witch scene is a lot smoother now. I've got a little left to go over there but I'm starting on the war machine.
Kevin Dorsey's voice is no longer in the dub anywhere. I sitll prefer his reading of the lines in that one scene, but with a good copy of the original recording now in my possession, there was no reason to use his reading anymore.
I am making changes to the sound mix to cut down on Robert Folk's score.
It's going well.
MORE NOTES ON THE CALVERT PRINCESS WORK IN PROGRESS:
I said the Calvert "Princess" work in progress had no actual Calvert animation in it yet ... but it does contain at least one shot that was animated by Calvert's team. There's a shot of Tack saying "please, you must help us," in pencil test, so Calvert's team definitely did that.
It's probable that they animated the one pencil shot of the witch's eye in the lamp too then. It matches the Calvert storyboards.
There's a curious shot of the witch's knee shaking, and her grabbing it to stop it shaking - this looks like a bad Calvert shot in the final cut, but it appears as finished animation in the Calvert WIP. And the animation in the WIP is different from what we see in the final (different background, slightly more on-model witch). Normally having finished animation in the WIP would mean it was a Williams shot, but it's too bad animationwise. My guess - Calvert's team started with the witch scene, doing test animation for this scene before any other, and they had a rough version of this shot done early on, which they later redid.
Also, I'm convinced that certain scenes which only appear as storyboards in this WIP, which SHOULD mean that Williams' team never even penciled them, were actually pencilled by the real guys and just not included in this cut.
Nanny's fight with the brigands seems like Williams work, and so does the last shot with Yumyum and Tack (despite it not matching Sean Connery's voice track).
There are other examples, but I'll stick with those.