Dave McKean & Mirror Mask news!!!

[CRISPY]

Dave McKean (ya know, the guy that did every cover to Sandman not to mention artwork for many of Neil Gaimen's comics like Mr. Punch and The Day I Traded My Dad for 2 Goldfish) is directing his 1st feature length film and here is the skinny on the plot and whatnot from www.aicn.com:

Hi, 4 days ago I met Dave McKean at the Clermont Ferrand Short Filmfest for which he designed the poster and was a member of the jury at the LABO section.

For those who don't know McKean just point out that he is a genius british comic-book-artist-designer-painter-sculptor (works ranging from Arkham Asylum to Sandman, etc) and that he is now becoming a film director.

I talked with him for about 15 minutes after a press conference he gave about his first feature film (he has shot two short films already), titled MirrorMask.

As IMDB points out, MirrorMask centers on Helena, a 15 year old girl in a family of circus entertainers, who often wishes she could run off and join real life. After a fight with her parents about her future plans, her mother falls quite ill and Helena is convinced that it is all her fault. On the eve of her mother's major surgery, she dreams that she is in a strange world with two opposing queens, bizarre creatures, and masked inhabitants. All is not well in this new world - the white queen has fallen ill and can only be restored by the MirrorMask, and it's up to Helena to find it. But as her adventures continue, she begins to wonder whether she's in a dream, or something far more sinister.

He has co-written the film with Neil Gaiman and his main references for it are "Alice in Wonderland", "Labyrinth" and the great Gilliam's "Time Bandits".

The film has now undergone 5 months of postproduction and has 4 more left ahead. Dave has formed a little animation studio with 15 artists for the film and hopes for a fall release.

Well the thing is, Dave talked about how this is a project that he planned to accomplish 5 years ago and how his plans were going well. He prepared the project so that every scene had a relatively easy as well as a really complex way to be accomplished and how his animation team where always heading for the difficult way.

He explained that his methods of writing and that of Neil differ a lot. Neil throws some characters into a scene and begins wrting the sequence from scratch, while Dave writes down every plot point , chracterization info, background history, etc... in little pieces of paper, spreads them on the floor, and tries different forms of assembling the story. He does not write a word of the script until he has the story completely closed.

He also talked about the small budget they have (around 5 million dollar) and about the mix of green screen, real footage, and CG footage and HE ACTUALLY SHOWED us a production still of the movie featuring THE CITY surrounded by smog and a long bridge coming out of it.

I have to say that the production values showed in the still where ABSOULTELY ASTOUNDING. It featured Dave's well known style but in a more-to-the-point concise way as he wants to show us a world that could really exist. Dave has visited lots of european cities, such as Venice in order to get real textures and buildings for the City he envisions.

Finally, Dave showed us a MoCap test for a 3D character in teh movie called SmallHairy. The funny thing about that is that it was Dave himself that was motion captured for this particular character. He even mimed some of the performance for me. I felt honoured

Sounds good to me so far. I cannot wait to see what they did in this movie!

[Bernkastel]

"Fantasy Worlds" ran an article in this year's issue about Mirrormask. I started to transcribe it, but then I started school and didn't finish. Here, however, is about half of the article:

Mirror Images: Peer Through the Glass Darkly as Artist Dave McKean Turns His Attention to Fantasy Filmmaking
by Joe Nazzaro

When Henson Pictures decided to put together a modestly budgeted fantasy-adventure film to be called "The Curse of the Goblin King," they turned to visionary artist-turned-filmmaker Dave McKean and his frequent collaborator, writer Neil Gaiman. The result is a thought-provoking, visually stunning feature that somehow fails to include any goblins, kings or, for that matter, a curse of any kind.

Instead, the retitled "Mirrormask" combines disparate ideas from McKean and Gaiman, fusing them into a project that's far more than the sum of its parts. As McKean recalls, "Neil did a one-line, back-of-the-envelope-type pitch, which was a fantasy version of the "The Prince and the Pauper." A character in some sort of fantasy realm would swap identities with somebody in the 'real' world, and each one would have to get by in the other's territory.

"I had a dream about a circus girl, who had an ill mother, did lots of drawings and made posters for the circus. She falls asleep one night, and retreats into this world that she has created for herself, to try and make some sort of difference. They were two different, very broad, basic ideas, but they felt compatible, and in the end, that's basically what "Mirrormask" is. The film's end even plays out Neil's original notion of "The Prince and the Pauper," because the characters' identities are kind of switched, but then they change back."

McKean is in North London, where he's spending most of his time traviling between the bohemian sprawl of Camden Town--where he's finishing the final edit of "Mirrormask"--and nearby Islington, home of the newly established post-production house that is creating the film's digital characters and environments.

"Right now," McKean relates, "we're about three weeks away from finishing the edit. Everything has been rough assembled and we're on the second and third passes of the edit. Nic Gaster is editing it, and this is the first time that I've properly worked with an editor, so that has been great. The team is set up, the first wave of machinery is in there humming away and we have 12 programmers creating the rest of the cast of characters. I've been delighted with how quickly everything is bobbing along. I'm so used to the models taking ages to rig and seeing stuff slowly come together, but the speed with which everything is getting thrown on the screen [is great]--it allows me to play a little bit and try other things.

"Nic actually prefers NOT to edit while I'm there, so we go through everything together and make lots of notes, and then I go away and he works on it. I come back later, and we go over it again, That's his preferred way of working, which is fine with me. Likewise, I don't want to look over people's shoulders all the time while they're modeling spiders and giants, and making them nervous. I would rather give them a good brief, showing them drawings, objects, textures and colors, and conveying to them as much information as I can. Then we'll talk about it: How the characters move, their weight and what specific actions they need to do. So they'll work on it for awhile, and I'll do the rounds again to see how everybody is doing. Some characters or environments need more of my attention than others, but htat generally seems to be a good way of doing it."

Because most of "Mirrormask" was shot in front of blue-screen backgrounds--so other elements could be added in post-production--McKean storyboarded the film out in advance. "I tended to be looser with the storyboards where it starts and ends in live-action," he says. "But for the bulk of the film, I storyboarded it very closely, for a number of reasons. The first was just to explain it to people, because it was an awful lot for our investors at Columbia, Sony and Henson to take in. I couldn't honestly expect anyone else to know what I was talking about, so I had to put something down on paper. It was also a kind of safety net for myself. And the third, really useful thing was to be able to show them to the actors. We were very lucky: Our leading lady, Stephanie Leonidas--the young girl at the center of the film--was just wonderful. She soaked up the whole experience and had a great time."

Although McKean doesn't want to reveal "Mirrormask"'s surprises, he agreese to a brief rundown of its premise. "It's about a young girl in a circus family. Her mother falls ill at the story's beginning," he explains. "One evening, Helena [Leonidas] realizes how sick her mother is, and that she's going to be operated upon that night. Also, the circus is falling apart, and her father isn't handling it particularly well. So all of these real-life pressures collide on her during one night.

"Helena goes to bed and retreats into this dream city that's made up of all the drawings that she pins to her bedroom wall. It's a very "Alice in Wonderland" kind of story. Initially, she hopes to help her mother as she wanders through the city and this little quest that's set up, but then it becomes slightly complicated. Helena assumes that she's asleep, but then it appears that sombody else--another version of herself--has taken over her life in the real world, and she's not sure what's going on there. Helena then strikes up a relationship with this character called Valentine, who guides her through the dream city."

Directing the full-length feature marks a different career direction for McKean, an award-winning mixed media artist and musician. Born in Berkshire, England, he attended the Berkshire College of Art and Design before leaving to pursue a career in illustration. In the mid-80s, he met Gaiman, beginning a creative partnership that continues today. Among their collaborations are the book "Violent Cases" (1987) and the comic books "Black Orchid" (1988), "Signal to Noise" (1990) and "Mr. Punch" (1994). But it was McKean's work on covers for the entire run of Gaiman's "Sandman" series that cemented his reputation as a visual pioneer and earned him the World Fantasy Award. A combination of collage, computer manipulation, photographic techniques and just about anything else McKean cared to throw in, each "Sandman" cover was uniquely memorable (and often disturbing) work of art.

But McKean's experience extends far beyond the comics. He has created CD and book covers, designed for film and television and been involved in music projects, photography and digital technology. All along, though, lurking in the background, was the desire to create his own films. "My nebulous five-year plan was to get this out of my system," he maintains. "I've loved films from when I was a six-year-old kid. I started playing around with a Super-8 camera at eight, so I've always wanted to make a movie, but I felt a bit daunted by it for a long time. I didn't want to make the same sort of films as everybody else. I wanted to find out what I wanted to do."

That voyage of discovery began with a series of shorts directed and financed by McKean himself. "For one of them, I wanted to make a silly, funny film, with music throughout," he says. "It's like a silent film. There's just music and images, and quite close storytelling, but no dialogue at all. I also wanted to do a very quiet, slow, melancholy movie, a sort of ghost story. So there were two extreme moods. I paid for the shorts. They cost very little, and I taught myself how to make films. I did them on those terms so that if I was rubbish at it, I didn't have to worry about spending other people's money--I could just throw them away. Also, I didn't want any editorial input. I wanted to discover things myself, so all the mistakes, but I didn't need to deal with other people's advice and problems as well. But both films turned out fine, and certainly the second one, "N[eon]," did very well and won a couple of prizes, so I'm happy about that.

At the time, Sony was inking a two-picture deal with Henson Pictures, and suggested that if they could assemble a low-budget fantasy project, the studio would hand over the money no questions asked. It sounded like a good idea, but who would be able to tackle an elaborate genre film for roughly $4 million?

[CRISPY]

That was fantastic, Grianne!!!! Thanks so much for transcribing & posting that info!!! (^3^)~chu