I Wish I Was There bts #1

Morning! As it’s been over 7 months since finishing my short ‘I Wish I Was There’, I thought it was high time that I shared some behind the scenes footage- don’t ya think? I’ll be rolling 3 clips out over the next 3 weeks, so keep an eye out on here for those.

Besides writing about screening selections etc, I’ve not really put much on here about my film since it was finished, but over half a year on, it’s nice to revisit it a little and show some of the workings behind the final piece. Maybe these extra clips might even tempt you to go check it out at an upcoming screening if you haven’t already done so. Who knows…

There’s also a lot more of a detailed deep dive into the ‘making of’, on my weekly updates I did on here throughout the whole process of creating the film. You can see those if you click HERE (scroll past all the screening selection stuff and then you’ll get to all the relevant juicy bits). Also, if you’re lost at any point, I wrote a dedicated post about rotoscoping 7 years ago, which you can see HERE, where I explain what it is and how I use it etc. Granted some of the links might not work anymore because I’ve changed IG handles and that, but the essence of the write up still stands. Maybe I should get round to changing those links.

I filmed a lot of the reference material of the film around my house and this first BTS clip illustrates that. So yes, I was lay on a sun lounger in my front room, dressed in a hospital gown, surrounded by skateboards in the depths of December 2024!

The process is basically outlines first, which I drew by hand frame by frame (side note: I DO NOT use AI in my work, just to clear that up. Generative AI can get to f*ck), using the reference material as a guide:

Then colour:

Lastly, I draw in the background. This one went through a few stages before settling on the final idea. As it was a dream sequence, I eventually decided I wanted a sort of surreal/ impressionistic background, harking back to the holiday setting the film is in, as opposed to the more literal representations of a hospital I had for the first few iterations of this scene. The first image below is the one I ended up discarding.

Hope this has been an interesting little look into my process. See you in the next one xo