Exerpts from the documentaries 'Divine Labour: Making The Silent Years' and 'History Repeats: Making the Special Edition' on the DVD of The Silent Years...
| (SIMON) "The original thinking behind the actual animation was actually looking about and seeing what the other students were doing... and realising there's a potential to try and inform better, than just show your skill of the artistic side of it... |
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I had made a friend in Richard, who was a cartoonist, and I realised that he had possibly the best skills for condensing all this information we were going to have to deal with, into a very simple animation showing sort of still images of a little monk explaining things or showing things, and of course it snowballed from there!"
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(RICHARD) "We went to Ampleforth college, which is like a modern working monastery. And there's monks there, and we spent the day wth them. We had a bowl of soup and some water for lunch. It was lovely! And we recorded the Father Prior speaking Latin for us, and we used that. We recorded sound effects around the monastery as well, doors banging, footsteps, and even the bell that they used to ring... |
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All the White Monks and the Lay Brothers were just made of ordinary modelling clay. And they were all done in a similar, very similar style, so they all look... They're not identical, they do have their idiosyncrasies, but they're made to look as if they're almost identical because they're just... they're background characters, the monks, really. You're seeing the story from the novice's point of view."
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(SIMON) "We didn't shoot it in order. That was quite interesting for me, 'cos I didn't realise that's what we'd have to do. And this is partly to do with our set buildings, which I don't know if Richard went into that, and partly to do with our access to certain rooms. Our sets were so big that some... Also we had to book the rooms, so the big room we of course used for our big sets. And they came in certain parts of the film. And then in the smaller room we did the much more detailed animation, and of course that was in different places on the tape."
(RICHARD) "What we tended to do in the little rooms was interior shots. You know, the interior of the warming house or the dormitory or whatever, and we would just have that set, on its own, set up. And then we would film every scene from the film which takes place in that room. We'd wind forward on the tape and say 'Right, we need a shot in the warming house here. We've got the warming house set up, let's film it.' We'd make sure the continuity was right; the lighting, the costumes, and we'd film that shot. And then we'd spin forward a bit on the tape. 'Right, here's another warming house scene, different costume, we'll film that.' And we did it like that for each set, because the sets took so long to set up."
(SIMON) "So at the end of it, I think we were both glad that we'd finished it, very happy to do so, but the relief was quite tremendous. But we learnt an awful lot. We met a lot of interesting people... from the staff in the kitchen where we went and hunted out boxes, 'What do you want cardboard boxes for?!' and paint, and clay, and all these things we had to assemble. So it just kept us busy all the time, and we thoroughly enjoyed it!"
(RICHARD) "We were pretty happy with the film when we finished it, I think. I'd say, you know, 70 or 80 percent happy, there was a lot that was not right; a hissy soundtrack, and a few shots which we just hadn't quite 'got' properly, and you couldn't really go back and do reshoots or anything, because you didn't have time."
(SIMON) "I'm sure Richard would have actually wanted to remake it the very day that we finished making it!"
(RICHARD) "We came out of it alright. We got a good grade and everything. We had the film playing at the Degree show, when there was a final Degree show at the end of the last year at college, and it was up there on the little screen, playing. We both turned up wearing T-shirts with the little monk on them! Silent Years T-shirts which we'd had made... It was a good experience, yeah."
(SIMON) "It's a learning process, so from the start to the end of that animation... we learnt so much that we could've remade it there and then, more than twice as well, as what we ended up with."
(RICHARD) "We weren't, either of us, completely satisfied with it, weren't happy with the film. But it was just a student project, it wasn't supposed to be perfect. It was only in later years when it became... started selling at Fountains Abbey and things I started to worry that it wasn't up to scratch, it wasn't professional enough. And I know Simon wasn't happy with the pace of it and everything, and the hiss on the soundtrack, so many problems in certain shots, glitches and things."
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(SIMON) "After leaving college we realised that you leave all the equipment and all the availability, that is - time, space, equipment, and also help. And of course we have to go off and make a living."
(RICHARD) "The idea of doing a special edition and remastering it was quite appealing, but again, it didn't seem likely, for a long time."
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On the 2006 Special Edition...
(SIMON) "Basically it's taken me ten years to get into a position where we have digital computers that can work with film, on a cost that I can afford, and also in a position where we both have the time to actually start this process again. But because we've had this project for 10 years, both of us felt there were certain aspects of the film that could be enhanced."
(RICHARD) "The shots that we've done for the new version have matched the old version pretty well. Some of them needed colour correction, just to get them to the exact same look as the original shots their trying to match to, but all in all, this new version has come out better than we thought actually. It's very nice now to have the chance to redo it, it's pretty much the way we wanted it originally. We've added new scenes, which have given it so much more scope... and just told the story better, you know... we've fixed all of the problems there were with the original. And hopefully this DVD is now the final, definitive Silent Years."
(SIMON) "So in our new version, which we have put new scenes in, we try to show other aspects of the time. But we're also going to do a talk over, on the DVD, trying to just bring to your attention other information that we've found interesting, that we've shown but I think we need to just hint upon as you view it. So the more times you view the animation, hopefully the more things you'll see, and the richer it becomes. And when you actually go to Fountains Abbey, or just about any abbey all over Europe, because they're all based roughly on the same concept, you will get a flavour of the twelfth century day in the life of a medieval novice monk!"
The Silent Years DVD is available now from our online shop.
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