Malcolm Hadley: Bringing light to miniature sets
British DOP Malcolm Hadley has been working on feature films, commercials and documentaries for two decades, including Oscar-nominated Tim Burton films Frankenweenie and Corpse Bride. In this podcast, Malcolm discusses the contrasts between working on stop frame features and stop frame commercials, and his journey from fine art into animation. Listen to the podcast and check out the transcript and images below.
Hello there and welcome to the next edition of the Movidiam podcast, we’re actually coming to you live from Upper James Street in the center of Soho where we’ve been demoing Movidiam to a great number of passing creatives, directors and filmmakers in the heart of Soho. Today we have Malcolm Hadley on the line, you might well know his portfolio of work. Welcome, Malcolm. It’s really a fascinating portfolio and body of work Malcolm that you’ve got and you can see it on your profile on Movidiam. Originally it started with a real passion for fine art and photography and moved into animation, can you talk a little bit about that?
That’s right, yeah I actually did Fine Art at University, a long time back now, and while I was there I grew more directed towards photography and animation and I just began making my own experiments. Luckily that led into working in the industry. It just came from an interest and then grew into a career.
Yeah it’s very interesting, a lot of people find themselves finding a job or having an interest which develops into a career, and for you an obviously very successful one. It’s a very, sort of, pleasing way of going about life.
Well it was. It all worked out well, I mean I couldn’t have foreseen where I’ve come to now and how I did it, but you know you take one step at a time. I just joined in a conventional way, joined as a runner at an animation company when I left university and not even then knowing quite which direction to go in, and like I said I had that background in photography. I tried my hand at various things, looked at different departments within the company, and really got involved in cinematography and became very passionate in it. I met some great people and learned a lot just by working with other camera people and becoming inspired by what they did, and really realizing what it was that they did because I didn’t have a clear idea about that until I joined the industry. You have an outsider’s view as a student and then you learn the real world when you join the industry I think.
Sure. As you know your URL on Movidiam is https://www.movidiam.com/dop — This brings me nicely onto lighting; lighting is a key part of your skill and expertise and you’ve done both lighting for commercials and also animations. Can we touch on briefly how the process is obviously very different, and how it differs from a lighting perspective when working on an animation or say, a commercial which might not be yet an animation?
“Lighting is something you can spend a lifetime learning how to do, and although there is a huge crossover between lighting for animation and live action, there are some very specific tools that you work in a slightly different way.”
Broadly you have the same approach as a live action DOP, so much as you try and bring the right kind of mood and atmosphere to a project, in close contact with the director and discussions about how a project should look. But then in the stop frame worlds, there are specific ways to do it and there are tools and tricks and techniques that you learn over the years. I mean the lighting I’d say generally can get a lot more intricate and involved, because you’re dealing with things often on a smaller scale. You kind of invent ways and learn ways of lighting things that fit to that scale, as it were.
I mean I think it’s just this thing that we discussed briefly when we last met as well about the sort of rebirth of stop motion and lighting, well stop motion projects in general actually. It’s a very authentic way of storytelling and people actually find the intricacies, and it sparks interest. I suppose you don’t often show people your work and they think “oh well I’ve seen that before somewhere”, there’s something very authentic about it. Do you find that you find that when people talk to you about it?
I think so, I think that interest keeps coming back. I listened to a few articles about the stop frame feature film, Anomalisa, that’s just been released. It touched upon a lot of things which I think are true about stop frame and animation in general. Stop frame’s got a tangibility that perhaps sometimes CG can’t have unless they’re incredibly high end projects because people somehow, without being conscious, know that those objects that are being animated are a real things and they have that kind of weight and texture that real world objects have, but they’re behaving in a way that perhaps they don’t in real life. It’s got that excitement to it and stop frame, I think I spoke to you the other day about it, we all felt, ten or fifteen years ago, that it was going to probably face extinction with the growth of CG. but it never really did. It ebbs and flows and comes back again. It seems stronger than ever actually, there’s a lot of interest commercially.
Yeah and there have been some outstanding executions of stop frame for brands, who are becoming the sort of new people that invest in films, also in the short form of it.
Yeah, commercially it’s a clever thing because a brand can make their work look very distinctive and set their work apart from other brands if they choose that route and they use it carefully. It can give their brand a real distinctive quality, and maybe they take a good step away from the usual slick, glossy work. We’re very conscious of advertising in this country and we’re very aware of how it works I think as viewers, generally. I think if advertisers can sometimes step away and do something different and distinctive, that can give their brand quite a weight in the marketplace.
Just thinking about the process you go through, it must be meticulous in its planning and also the execution. Movidiam is a really interesting domain for 2D, 3D, visual effects guys, and I suppose on the profiling side it’s very interesting, but do you think the project management side is of interest to you, organizing the logistics of a stop motion shoot and bringing people together?
I think it will be more and more. I also run a small company with my brother called www.hadleybrothers.co.uk and I think this year we may use Movidiam. At the moment it’s a portfolio site of some merit and kind of better than most of the ones out there, but I think the other strands of Movidiam are going to be a real strength for working with other creatives and bringing people together perhaps outside of our shared contact list. We’ve been looking for people who have got other skills that can fit in around ours, and I think Movidiam would be a really useful addition to build on the roster of contacts that you already have, and quite a quick way of working with people and finding people that maybe are abroad that you won’t be in close contact with, so I think that’s a whole new area that has grown quite a lot.
I know from your career and portfolio, you’ve worked with some of the industry’s leading directors. What mindset do you have when approaching these projects? Are you looking to guide them with your expertise, or vice versa? How is your working relationship on some of these bigger projects that you’ve worked, because I know our listeners will be fascinated by Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie and films like that.
Yeah I think they’re really different. There’s the commercial work, where you’re working with a handful of people, and sometimes you work with directors that really don’t have the stop frame experience and you can offer a lot, and give advice about techniques. I think when you work on the feature scale, you’re sometimes working with hundreds of people on a crew rather than just a handful. So everyone’s very specialized and has a very distinct role within that production and then the size of that machinery means that the planning, preparation and the production level of organization becomes much bigger. But I think some of the best work is produced in that sector of the industry. I mean you tend to do shots and work on sequences that can last several months, and in that respect you produce work that you probably could never do in commercials. You try new things and techniques that have never been used before.
I suppose it’s a resource thing isn’t it, if you’ve got the time and resources to spend a couple of months on a very short sequence, that’s what creates the production value which is reflected at the end of the day.
Frankenweenie particularly, I look back at some of the sequences that I was involved in that took several months from beginning to end and you just don’t get that opportunity to really develop a sequence in stop frame animation in anything but feature work. It’s a really exciting place to work but they’re long term projects and you have to give up a certain amount of freedom and become committed to a different kind of project on that scale.
So, festivals and awards — you’ve won Best Cinematography in short films, various awards over your career, how has that catapulted you forward? Has that been an essential point when being considered by others in looking for future work?
Maybe, not as much as I’d like! I think it’s great to get awards and you know I’ve worked on a lot of films that have been nominated for BAFTAs and Oscars and so on, so it’s really nice to know that you’re working on projects that are leading in their fields. It certainly helps, it adds to your portfolio and adds value, and it gives you a sense of recognition. It’s hard to know exactly how that feeds back into how much work you get, who knows.
It all sounds and looks very impressive. So what’s next, Malcolm, any big projects you’re working on? Perhaps you can’t tell us but it’d be nice to just have a little glance into the next six, twelve months or more and if you’ve got anything exciting in the pipeline.
Yeah there are a few projects. There are some that I can’t really talk about obviously. I’m talking to somebody at the moment — I’m curious to step foot into the world of VR 360 filming which I’ve not really done before, so that’s something that’s being developed at the moment. But again I can’t really discuss the specifics of the job.
It sounds like that actually is a part of the industry that’s really growing quickly, virtual reality. Computer game player video, immersive technology that we see from Facebook, and others who need support from what might be traditionally called ‘filmmakers’.
What’s interesting is that there are productions that are, whether they’re commercially led or not, combining elements of stop frame, time-lapse, live action…I think the only limit is what the director’s creative vision might be and then you bring your experience into play and feed back into that process and give them ideas that perhaps they hadn’t even thought of. There’s definitely much more hybrid production, if you like, from different spheres, mixing different kinds of filmmaking together and producing something different which I think is really exciting, and I’d love to continue in that vein. Because you never know; each job is very different and as long as that happens then you’re creatively still excited and fulfilled.
It is interesting. Just going back to the stop motion, I was just thinking — occasionally you see a video that’s passed around from peer to peer or production company to production company, it’s got a sense of awe to it and it really is that sense of awe that I find stop motion has and it captures the public attention actually. I think it is going to grow and grow as brands really start to find a way of differentiating, because there’s a lot of high production values, glossy stuff, yet perhaps it doesn’t have the sensitivities that your work has.
If you look at the OXO ads, there’s a whole series of commercials they’ve done now that are pixelated. They’re stop frame, we’re animating a person as if they are a puppet. There’s a Samsung job with the origami character, there’s the Toblerone packs, I mean they’re jobs that I think a lot of people would look at them and not quite figure out how they’re done. They may have an idea or some people may just think oh it’s all done with computers and of course, we involve computers and motion control and digital capture in all of our work, so we’re using a very old technique with new technology and combining those things together to produce interesting work. Hopefully that will remain interesting and an innovative way to work.
As a process, the barriers to entry are relatively low — with an inexpensive camera and a breakfast table you can move and get the sense of stop motion by moving the salt and pepper pots around, so you have an early testing experience. The magic of becoming a filmmaker can be investigated by people pretty early on in their career.
Absolutely. Just last week, my son who’s nine made a little stop frame film for his school project. The equipment’s very easy to come by, I mean you can use stop frame apps on your phone and it’s just your imagination you need to bring to it, and the ideas that count. When I started, we shot on film cameras and that’s the way I trained up. The investment was huge and you needed to be working at a studio to get your hands on that kind of equipment, so I think technology has really freed that side up.
Absolutely, and put you at the speed of thought. It’’s not at all restricted by the technology which is very interesting.
I’d only add that although technology is freely available, it’s the idea that of course matters at the end of the day, and also the whole experience of lighting which I think more than anything else takes years to get to grips with, so it’s all of those things coming together.
Absolutely, and I don’t want to belittle that with my suggestion that anyone could do stop motion…it’s the effect that can be achieved quite relatively easily, but to do it well takes decades of training and I think the lighting is the most important part that we see in lots of areas in filmmaking.
Malcolm it’s been lovely to talk, thanks so much for your time.
Thanks very much.
So we were just speaking to Malcolm Hadley and I highly recommend you head over to Movidiam and check out his profile. He’s done some really remarkable work in the space we were just discussing, and I very much look forward to seeing what he does next. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed it. If you have seen our previous podcast with Nino Leitner or Hive Division please do check them out on the Movidiam blog or the iTunes store.
