Concept and creative process
A title sequence for ‘Moondial’, a children’s drama serial in which a chain of events led a young woman back in time and into a desperate struggle with witches, evil spirits and maybe the devil himself. The idea came about to create a mysterious, slightly disturbing sequence to follow on directly from quite a long pre-title sequence of the drama itself. It was important to reflect the same time of night, lighting etc so that the sequence blended from this dramatic sequence into the title sequence itself. Model maker Alan Kemp created a model in the form of a brass sundial which was mounted onto a replica antique stone base (made of fibre glass). A raven and a dove were hired with a handler from a specialist animal hire company. The raven was not particularly well trained and was quite difficult to shoot. It had a massive 150cm wing span and kept flying onto the cameraman's shoulders! We managed to get just one good take of it flying onto the sundial and resting for a moment. The dove was so much easier to control. The handler simply dropped his hand and the dove flew on to the sundial. In post-production a hand drawn animation was created in order to morph the black raven into a white dove. This was created before CGI or digital morphing techniques had been developed, so everything had to be done by hand or other ingenious methods to create effects. The word ‘Moondial’ was drawn up by Fen Field and then animated onto the screen by using two clear on black film Kodaliths pegged together on the separate peg bars of a 35mm rostrum camera table top. The Kodaliths were then back-lit and animated frame by frame in opposite directions. This was filmed in reverse so that on projection the lettering came together and revealed itself in perfect registration as the logo. The streaks were created by using the light scan technique of keeping the aperture open. The sequence was put together in the film laboratories, as this was before the availability of digital compositing.
Cameraman - Doug Adamson.
Live Action Direction & Design - Liz Friedman.