Making An Illustrated Film - Godkiller

This week I’m back to work on “Godkiller,” Halo-8’s first Illustrated Film. An Illustrated Film is a highly stylized animated movie that mixes original graphic novel illustrations with motion graphics and dramatic voice performances to create an edgy new style of story telling. Its like Liquid Television meets Ralph Bakshi, allowing us to tackle stories that we wouldn’t be able to do with video.

Halo-8 doesn’t have experience producing animated titles, so I didn’t have a post production work flow in place. I sought advice from a couple of people who work with traditional animation, then tried to adapt that work flow to Illustrated Films. The VO recording was handled by The Engine Room in Hollywood. We recorded the voice actors in separate sessions as “wild lines,” meaning there was no cut picture for them to reference. After the session, I would get the audio files organized by script page, which left me with the chore of compiling all the takes together. Basically, I gather each take of every line of dialogue and stack them on top of each other in the timeline. When all of the takes are compiled, I have what I call the “Take Matrix.” There can be anywhere from 2 to 12 takes of every line. By putting each take on a subsequent audio track, I can solo individual tracks and quickly hear every take of a line. After the Take Matrix is assembled, I go through every take and copy the select take to track one. When I’m done with that process, track one represents a completely compiled performance for that actor using the best read of each line. If I need to make tweaks, I can easily go back into the Take Matrix and audition other reads.

This was especially useful in working with Lance Henriksen’s performance. Lance likes to do long takes and fall into a groove. He’ll do a bunch of these long takes, kind of riffing on the dialogue and making subtle variations along the way. His compiled dialogue performance ended up with a lot of edits because I went deep into mixing and matching his variations, pulling individual phrases of a monologue from several different takes. It makes for a really dynamic voice performance.

"Take Matrix" for Lance Henriksen's performance in Godkiller.

Once you’ve got a Take Matrix for each actor, its very easy to combine all of the actors selected takes into the final dialog track for the film. You just go to track one of the Take Matrix for each actor, copy from the compiled performance on track one, and paste the dialog into the master edit. Its easy to make tweaks as necessary by going back to the Take Matrix and auditioning new lines.

Godkiller - Official Trailer

Early this this year, Halo-8 made an ambitious leap into the new medium of Illustrated Films. The first production is “Godkiller: Walk Among Us”, featuring the voices of Lance Henriksen, Daniel Harris, Bill Moseley, Nicki Clyne, Davey Havok, Justin Pierre, and more. I’ve been working on the Godkiller post-production on and off since February, and the first release is slated for September. You can read more about our release plans at Bloody Disgusting, and more about the movie at Godkiller.tv.

I want to say thanks to the people who helped bring GK to life. Its a small, talented team of enthusiastic professionals, and we couldn’t have done this without them. I’ll be writing more about the production process in later posts. If you’re curious, stay tuned.