One Animator, 78 minutes and 5 years

Phil Nibbelink, has made a feature film all by himself...Seriously.

The name of his film is Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss.
It's a retelling of the classic Shakespeare play using seals
in an underwater setting and is being released Oct 27th.

The film was animated in Flash and backgrounds painted in Painter. The dialogue was recorded in his basement studio using himself, his children and friends for the voices. There are around 112,000 drawings using a graphics tablet and few scenes were animated using Moho. The Flash files were rendered as 2048 x 1234 .bmp files and sent to a film recorder. He chose to set the movie in the undersea world because to complete the film before his bank account ran out, he had to populate the movie with characters that didn't "have too much line mileage." This is actually the 3rd time he's made a film completely by himself in his studio basement. The first two were Puss in Boots and Leif Ericson: The Boy Who Discovered America.

From animationnation thread:

I animated straight ahead. I ruffed in light blue with the brush tool set for thick and thin, then I cleaned up with the pencil tool set for 3.1. (After many film tests I decided a width of 3.1 was optimum.) Then I would move on to the next extreme. I used the onion skin set for just the previous extreme and then I'd play it constantly to see it animate.

I didn't need storyboards because I could see it in my mind and I didn't have to communicate my vision to anyone else. I wrote the script and then started animating. I didn't even bother to refer back to the script because the characters took on a life of their own and they told me what they wanted to say and where they wanted to go next.

I animated at 2048 x 1234 which is 1.66. I then composed for 1.85 and TV cut off with a center extraction. 1.66 is a good aspect ratio to shoot at because when you telecine the TV cut off brings your north and south back to 1.85. And if you've composed for center extraction there are no nasty surprises and you don't have to pay for 'pan and scan'.

Because my characters were predominately one color I could mass paint behind all the drawings and then come back and hit the over paint with a color set at 0 alpha. By mass paint I mean I could shrink the work space down to micro small and then use a huge brush to bang down a giant blob of color across the entire screen and all the frames. And then come back and 0 alpha the overpaint and then come back again and hit the eyes, nose and inside mouth. I could paint 100 frames in 15 minutes without breaking a sweat!


Here's a list of theaters that it's going to play in.
And here's the web-site for the film for more info.

Phil Nibbelink will be sketching free drawings for kids in the lobby of:

Mann's Plant 16
7876 Van Nuys Boulevard
Van Nuys, CA 91402
(818) 779-0323
on Saturday the 14th
from 12:00 noon to 6:00

Mann's Janss Marketplace 9
255 North Moorpark Road
Thousand Oaks, CA 91360
(805) 374-9656
Sunday the 15th
from 12:00 noon to 6:00

Trailer #1

Trailer #2

thanks to Steve Gordon's Blog and posts on Animation Nation for this...