Here’s some more behind the scenes ‘gossip’ on the making of the Year of the Dealer films – this time the John Bell of Aberdeen film at The Bowes Museum – you can watch the final version of the film HERE. You can also read a little more about John Bell of Aberdeen in an earlier post on the research blog – ‘Antique Shops Then & Now‘.
One thing we were still working on in the early drafts for the John Bell film was how the avatars would look and sound – we eventually ended up with two avatars that we thought represented Mark and Mo relatively well in all five sets of films (see below – the final avatars with The Bowes Museum in the background).
A Big Reveal (for those that do not already know this of course) is that the Mark avatar voice is me of course (Mark); the Mo avatar voice is actually my lovely wife Mo! We had considered hiring other people (or indeed some professional actors) to be the voices of Mark and Mo but the work required was impossible to fit into a defined time period and needed to be spread over many months to accommodate various edits etc., so it was extremely difficult to cost it for an external supplier and very hard to work up a firm schedule.
One extra complication of this was that any edits and new lines of audio (of which there were many) had to be recorded in exactly the same environment and conditions to match in with the existing audio. We could not afford to record the audio in a Sound Studio – we actually recorded the audio at home in my then home office – or ‘bedroom 3’ as it was! This brought up many challenges – we had, for example, some very loud Wood Pigeons in the garden and often had to wait for sound breaks in their cooing before pressing ‘record’ on the audio recorders!
The early drafts of the visual material for the avatars that Patrick Bannon (our brilliant film-maker) worked on were often quite something! Here’s one of the early drafts of the Mark avatar (see below). We thought this looked a bit too cartoon-like (and a bit too young!).
And here’s a similar early draft of the Mo avatar (see below) – which we also thought looked a bit too cartoon-like (we were also not sure why Mo’s early avatars were stuck in a forest either!)
Patrick sent us various other ideas before we eventually settled on the final versions of the avatars – here’s a couple more versions (see below) – this one is getting a bit closer to the finished version of the Mark avatar, but still looked a bit too stern…..and perhaps a bit too much like a ‘psycho-killer’!
And another early version of the Mo avatar (see below) – which we thought maybe made the Mo avatar look a bit too ‘Gen Z’ .
As you might appreciate there was an awful lot of work in creating and producing the films and a lot of decisions to be made; we would like to thank Patrick again for all his hard work (and patience!) on various drafts, iterations and edits.
Look out for next week’s blog for another ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’.
Mark
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