Brent Leavitt and Dr. Dean Duncan, Media Arts Department
The following information details our production group’s attempt at producing the Light Princess. Ultimately the project didn’t make it much further than the conceptualization and pre-production phase. However, as it did take place in an educational setting there were many experiences facilitated by the initiation of this project.
The Light Princess media project was the long anticipated project to be tackled and produced by the Children’s Media Initiative (CMI) in the Theater & Media Arts Department. Originally written by the classical fairytale author George MacDonald, the script was produced in a workshop class of CMI. The executive producers had been toying with how to approach the piece for more than a year before turning it over to our creative team. The executive producers of CMI gave the script to the director, Mark Elsworth, with the option of assembling his own creative team. That is where I got involved in the project. Our creative team consisted of a director and two producers (a combination that I had seen in past projects to be advantageous to the production of the project), Josh Wright and myself.
We began meeting in November of 2004. There were many issues to tackle in the creation of a new media project. The first question was that of the script. In its initial form it was not suitable for student production. Not only were script revisions a major task, but getting executive approval of changes and/or varying from the original script was a task. Because of the length of the script we entertained discussions of alternative mediums. The bulk of the discussion pivoted around a part animated, part live action execution of the script.
Because of previous exposure and experience in Flash, I became the main supporter of a part animated production. We would use Flash (typically a web-authoring tool) to create simplified animation sequences for the secondary story.
Among the challenges we faced in pre-production, getting commitments from actors and a production designer were our biggest deterrents to the project. The time required of everyone and having to balance that with a full school load was another challenge. The project though still being pushed forward lost momentum when commitments were not followed through. Another important challenge was understanding the nature of the relationship with the live action elements such as actors and set designs to the animation.
When it became obvious that production on the live action was going to be postponed until after the semester had ended, I turned my attention to the execution of the animated sequences. We had several meetings with the storyboard artist for the animation, Rosalie Hovley. She was very flexible in allowing for director’s modification and interpretation. The story boarding experience, an important part of any story’s development, was extremely beneficial. My only regret, because we were ultimately working in Flash was that the boards were not created within Flash itself, which could have saved hours of time in the transfer.
With the animated storyboards in place, we chose to move ahead with the animated sequences. Still in question were four major considerations which we had hoped to resolve during the animation process: actors, wardrobe, production design, and location. But with the help of three other pre-animation major students, we organized a mini production house-type routine for tackling the animated parts of the project. Jed Henry was our character design artist, and what a natural gift he had. Using a Wacom tablet, he was able to draw characters and their distinct poses/ body parts with ease. He also brought to the team a fresh look in character art. Blake Johnson and I were animating Jed’s characters. Cody Lloyd was helpful in attending to miscellaneous preparations for animation and backgrounds. We set up a weekly schedule where we worked for approximately 6 hours a week for one month together in a computer lab.
It is notable that we were able to attend to the work of an animation production facility with only four computers, Wacom writing tablets, and flash drives (which were the only purchases for the project) for transferring files from one computer to the next.
Ultimately what brought the project to a grinding halt was the reality that until those essential factors related to the live action portion of the project had been addressed, the animation could not go forward with any stable footing. The decision was made to postpone animation until after the filming of the live action. The live action at that point had been postponed also until August 22-26. Because of my pending graduation in April I had to withdraw my involvement as a producer to attend to post graduation plans. Then as the summer progressed and personal setbacks came to other key members of the production team, the project was postponed indefinitely.
At the end of the project, I am sad to see that it hasn’t yet made it to production. I would like to some day see a feature length treatment of this great story. There is a story of personal sacrifice in the prince’s fictional character that is rare in film. It is such a fresh approach to the princess fairytale that it should be told.
I express appreciation to the ORCA grants program for providing sources of funding to this project.