Here's a still from MirrorMask, the upcoming film from director Dave McKean and writer Neil Gaiman. Teaming up with the Jim Henson Company, they combine live action with digital animation.
MirrorMask tells the story of Helena (Leonidas), a fifteen-year-old girl working for her family circus, who wishes-quite ironically-that she could run away from the circus and join real life. But such is not to be the case, as she finds herself on a strange journey into the Dark Lands. On her quest to return home, Helena searches for the Mirrormask, an object of enormous power, which is her only hope of escaping the Dark Lands.
When discussing the film, director Dave McKean is brutally frank about the process. "I don’t know where to start," McKean said. "Every day was a steep learning experience...I would say I have learned most about my own strengths and weaknesses. I have a tendency to fall in love with the purity of a formal solution to a problem, and then I just become blind to its possible flaws, and any little changes made feel like they are watering down the idea. I think this caused several difficulties on the film, and I think I'll be conscious of that tunnel vision from now on.
"Editing is always a wondrous experience, an alchemical experience. But on this film, working with an editor really for the first time, and noticing his approach, continually 'on the story', was a big lesson. Any block of dialogue in the script longer than three lines looked suspiciously like fat needing to be trimmed. We cut our penultimate edit, which didn't have any scenes or large chunks to shed, down by ten minutes just by trimming frames, and the odd shot. I have no idea where all that fat came from, but it really helped.
I have also learned that you don't start up a new computer-rendering studio during production. The little blighters need at least three months to get to know each other before an animator goes anywhere near them. And finally, I learned that computers are as human as the rest of us. Our technical director named all the machines after different bands. The four Macs in the edit suite were named after the Beatles; fair enough, I was John. But then we needed a fifth so he named it Yoko, and they all stopped talking to each other."
In addition to the potent collaboration of McKean and Gaiman, according to the writer, the inspiration for the story's setting is just as inspiring. "Dave and I created the story and script for MirrorMask in the Henson family home in London," Gaiman said. "Surrounded by memorabilia and artifacts from Jim Henson's astonishing career in television and fantasy filmmaking. It was a true challenge and inspiration to try to make something today that would be as visually rich, creative, funny and as moving as Jim Henson’s original works."
