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The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Director's Cut (Released) — Page 10
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The last one's just taunting me. Oh spring scene, where art thou ...
Sketch of Zigzag and King Nod.
http://www.vegalleries.com/misccels/43thief04.jpg
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[url]http://orangecow.org/thief/marchofthe1eyes.mp3[/url]
Music: Dance of the one eyes.
[url]http://orangecow.org/thief/1eyesdance.mp3[/url]
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You know, besides all the work that the picture will need on a true Disney restoration... I'm really concerned with how the sound will be handled. Even if it's a temp track, every bit of music in the workprint fits perfectly. The sound effects may need work and I'd imagine the voices would need sweetening. A lot of restorations end up having a lot of unnecessary modifications (like the 5.1 mix made for the Vertigo restoration). On the other hand, there's some 5.1 mixes that are completely true to the original mono track like Snow White's 5.1 track or Warner's excellent 5.1 remix of North by Northwest.
It makes me wonder if Disney would go for a full 5.1 mix. If all the separate voice recordings, music tracks, and effects exist in isolated form, they could create a terrific mix... but I don't want to hear something like Miramax's mix that is completely overblown. Maybe just keeping it mono would be a good idea, although, would Richard Williams intend for the final version to be mono... plain stereo, or even 5.1?
Finally, I'm convinced that the temp music for "One-Eye Dance" and "March of the One-Eyes" is original music from Richard Williams' jazz band. The poor audio quality on the old workprint was too distorted to tell, but with the better fidelity, it really sounds like a small jazz sextet. It's obvious because both tracks are brass and drums only. However, I suspect the opening music during the narration is something composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Then, the rest of the music sounds like it's synthesizer. There's also a few sections that sound like classical inserted between parts.
If you can get any confirmation from any of the people you've been contacting to get something concrete, that would be awesome. I'd really love to have the original source music in CD-quality if it's non-original.
"Listen here, there ain't nothing in this world that's perfect!"
- from The Bank Dick
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Very possible. The version of "One Eye Dance" in the Princess WIP seems to be a similar but different recording, which doesn't really tell us anything either way.
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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.
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Keep up the good work.
“You know, when you think about it, the Ewoks probably just crap over the sides of their tree-huts.”
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Speaking of help, is there any way I could help? I am quite competent with GIMP/Photoshop and I am fervently in love with The Thief and the Cobbler...
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MORE THOUGHTS on the Princess WIP
About the last shot not matching Sean Connery's voice track, but my thinking it's Williams pencils anyway ...
This is possible. The Calvert team actually reworked the mouths on some Williams pencils to make it match their own voice track. King Nod saying "Oh my darling, take care" (seems to have been silent in Williams' version, mouth movements added) ... and Yumyum introducing herself to the brigands - this was reedited to match the faster temp track by some bad actress, and the final animation was inked off of that.
The final shot could well have gotten the same treatment - a faster Tack speaking, but the basic poses could still be Williams, with Williams backgrounds, Williams birds flying by and Williams rose petals (or whatever that is) in the air.
Yes, at this point in this edit, I am thinking about these things in this kind of detail. It's gotten COMPLICATED yo.
MORE THOUGHTS ON THE PENCIL TESTS
Ken Harris, great Warner Bros. animator, was "master animator" on the film - I've always associated him most with the character of The Thief. It's said that he animated very fast and very simply - he was known less for his drawing skill than his skill with motion.
There is a pencil test here of the Thief rolling down the hill in a wheeled garbage can, and it's very simple and very elegant, and seems to speak of Ken Harris. I've almost never seen pencil tests of The Thief because all his stuff was finished early on (when the film was The Thief Who Never Gave Up).
The garbage can is just its basic outline, none of the complicated colors and extra lines that were added to it later. The Thief is drawn simply and directly, looking more like the Roadrunner than he does normally. It has no bells and whistles, but the motion is dead on to what it is in the film.
Very interesting. The styles bear comparison. All of Williams' pencil animation of Zigzag, seen in the workprint and elsewhere, is really complicated and on-model. The great Art Babbit's animation of the dying soldier is equally complicated ...
Ken Harris does it simply but gets it just right.
(There is one shot in there too of an early King Nod, by Babbit presumably, which just doesn't look right yet.)
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If you're assembling the clips used in the film, could you send that to me in DVD M2V format?
Ah, it's not necessary. I can just put it out like this ...
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"Dispose of rubbish here - This is your desert - keep it tidy."
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Here is
By the way, I'm preparing the NSV videos for GBSTV broadcast (that's the format we use). A Christmas Carol converted BEAUTIFULLY. Thanks to the style, you can hardly see any compression artifacts, despite being around 140 kbps video! I did a really speedy encode on Arabian Knight. I simply too the torrent laserdisc version, deinterlaced it, corrected the contrast and color, and letterboxed it (we have to show everything 4x3). I used a low compression bitrate, so it looks soft, blurry, and compressed. After all, who cares how THAT version looks?
Both ACC and the Thames doc look splendid in their NSV encodes. The clips of "Thief" in the doc look as good as the Miramax footage! Of course, when downsizing to 320x240, anything can look better.
Here's a list of the clips that I'll have to source from:
- Chinese Dance from Fantasia
- Moving Day (Mickey Color Vol. 1) [Goofy pushing piano into truck
- Queen holding minichest "Magic Mirror on the Wall..." from Snow White
- Dumbo (Stork on cloud)
- Country Mouse (snapping finger, hitting jello)
- Russian Dance from Fantasia Last 30-40 sec.
- Three Pigs - from end
- Three Pigs - Wolf climbing down chimmney
- Goofy's Moving Day (another push in from interior, this time glaring back)
- Live-action tests for Snow White (supplements)
- Snow White - whistle while you work
- Snow White - One Song
- Snow White - doubly shure
- Pinochhio clocks
- Pinocchio "just the name"
- Animation Strike
- Thief "Destruction and Death"
Not only can I get the animation clips, but I can also get clips of live-action reference, as well as some footage of the strike.
Maybe someone else can provide the Pinocchio clips... I won't be back in Decatur until next Sunday. Also, I take it that you'll drop in that one Thief clip in letterboxed form? Seeing it in pan & scan is a headache. Some of the doc audio and clip audio overlaps, so you might have to do some creative sound editing.
"Listen here, there ain't nothing in this world that's perfect!"
- from The Bank Dick
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Here's an example of some of the more complicated digital effects work I'm doing on this project.
This shot doesn't exist in the workprint (or Miramax version). It's possibly a Calvert invention. Either way it only appears in the "Princess" version of the film, in pan & scan.
For shots that are only in pan & scan, I had the option of either using them as pan & scan in my edit (easy) ...
Or doing a lot of work and creating moving backgrounds for them.
Knowing me, I did the latter.
An early version of the painting for this shot appears in the Princess WIP. I redrew it to match the final version, and animated it myself to add rain to it, and lightning, and match the general look of the shot.
Then I place the pan & scan version over it.
From Princess WIP:
Photoshop ...
http://orangecow.org/thief/warmachinedrawingphotoshop.jpg
Then I added rain. Keyframing is used frame by frame to roughly match the flashing lighting of the real shot.
Other shots:
This background was created for a shot of the Thief falling, which I only had in pan & scan. It was cobbled together from various screen grabs. It was keyframed to match the actual background as he falls, frame by frame.
http://orangecow.org/thief/thieffallingbg.jpg
Here's a big background for a major shot of the witch. This had to be keyframed to be the right brightness in each frame, and then it moves at the end, and that had to be matchmoved also.
http://orangecow.org/thief/witchbigbg.jpg
Another witch backdrop, which had to be matchmoved.
http://orangecow.org/thief/witchbg2.jpg
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You know... if you can get the raw Animation Art to me, I can do the "reconstruction." I really want to try out editing something complex now that I've learned to do a lot of stuff with Sony Vegas 6. As for the audio, I can get the audio to dissolve from the clips to the video mix perfectly. It might be easier considering there's a lot of clips.
"Listen here, there ain't nothing in this world that's perfect!"
- from The Bank Dick
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I'll send you as much as I can ... when I can.
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U r 1 crazy bastard... and we love you for it.
Dr. M
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That's been my one worry. In your Return of the Jedi restoration, where you resurrected Anakin's eyebrows, and in Star Wars Magic, in the "widescreened" Jabba scene, you can tell you layered one image over another, as they don't quite register, and while it's nice, it's a little disconcerting. Are the layers of animation registering to one another more easily?
But OCP, seriously, I'm really, really impressed. It looks like you are truly doing the best you can, and way, way better than anybody would have ever expected. What with Disney's assistance that the materials to restore the film weren't available, you're making them look like a bunch of douchebags. Nice work.
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The effect varies from shot to shot. It's never going to be perfect obviously because I'm combining a sharp looking DVD image with horrible ratty old VHS bootlegs.
Some shots look pretty good, others have issues. The march of the One Eyes looks pretty good because it's mostly monochrome stuff, so there are no colors to match, which makes it a lot easier. There are shots in there which I'd call perfect.
The workprint is not in true 24p, I had to just smudge the frames together to get 24p, so sometimes when there's really fast motion around the edges of the frame you can see the wrong frames poking through, and blah blah blah headache.
In all cases, you can tell I've done something to reconstruct the widescreen image. I'd say it comes off pretty well overall though.
It's definitely worth it to reconstruct the widescreen. These shots shouldn't be seen in pan & scan, and it makes the clear part of the image look even clearer.
I've done some work on some of the crappy Calvert shots in the war machine sequence, to make them look better.
There are some Williams-pencilled shots of the war machine on fire, which were animated on twos or threes - it looks awful since it should be on ones. I've put a double or triple layered ghosting effect over the animation - voila, it's now on ones, and looks great.
I did the same thing to two Calvert shots which attempted poorly to duplicate Williams' moving camera - so this is smudging inbetween frames of actual character animation, which looks awful, but it's more fun to watch than the actual Calvert shots, so screw it.
There's a bad shot of poorly-drawn lightning around the war machine. I should have redrawn that myself frame by frame, but I settled for color correcting every other frame to be very dark, so that the lightning looks slightly more realistic (and harder to see). I replaced one flash with a more realistic flash from elsewhere in the shot.
I also digitally created lighting effects to fake one important shot of Tack with the balls.
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Complicated shot I decided to do for this version, since this was always one of my favorite bits from the workprint. (Music kicks in here suggesting that the Thief is a pawn of destiny.) Nine layers are involved.
The background is from the Miramax DVD, so it's nice and clean. It's been keyframed to match the changing brightness of the workprint.
The Thief is painted out of the frame, then the workprint Thief is composited over this with lumakey.
(The Thief "dissolves" in as he falls, making it seamless.)
The claw hand is added in, and animated to match the workprint. (Upper right of screen.)
Two falling rocks are added in, also animated to match the workprint. (Lower right of screen.)
Also using lumakey, the darker areas of the left side of the screen are pasted in from the workprint, so some of the little extra action (arrows, rocks) taking place in the background is still sort of there, though not super visible.
Black bars are added in at top and bottom.
The witch - the background has been cobbled together from various screen grabs. It's keyframed to match the changing brightness of the shot. The witch is taken from the pan & scan DVD. The widescreen parts (her hands, and the little spotlight at the bottom) are taken from the workprint and added over the dark background with lumakey.
As she walks, the background is keyframed to get brighter and move with her, and gradually this becomes a regular shot with the pan & scan DVD image pasted over the workprint, that you see here. Black bars added on the left.
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Damn. I'm amazed at how seamless the blending between the layers is. It's obvious where the changes are, due to quality differences, but they line up perfectly.
And it's insane how complicated the witch is. Sheesus.
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I used to be very active on this forum. I’m not really anymore. Sometimes, people still want to get in touch with me about something, and that is great! If that describes you, please email me at [my username]ATgmailDOTcom.
Hi everybody. You’re all awesome. Keep up the good work.
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Looking closely, they all have little robes.