Nick Gellatly
Pre Production
This week was the point where My Beautiful Laundrette stopped being the film I had chosen and started being a motion graphics project. The emphasis was on pre-production: understanding the story, deciding what my titles need to communicate, storyboarding, thinking about sound, and starting to build a consistent visual language.
One thing I am learning is that pre-production is not the bit before the creative work starts. It is the creative work.
What am I actually trying to say?
I went back to the film. Rather than treating the title sequence as a chance to make attractive graphics involving washing machines, I wanted to understand what sits underneath the story.
I read a number of online synopses of the film – from the time of original release as well as more contemporary views.
The last of these was a summary published on You Tube (Dr Sonal’s Literature Lab)
At its simplest, the film is about Omar, a young British Pakistani in south London, who takes over a failing laundrette and brings in Johnny, his old schoolfriend and sometime lover, to help turn it into Powders. Around them are family expectations, racism, Thatcherite enterprise, property, money, drugs, and Johnny’s involvement with a racist skinhead gang.
The more useful question became how a title sequence might introduce those ideas without explaining them. Which led to the metaphor the whole thing now rests on: put Britain through the wash.
The machine can hold all of it. Money, Britishness, race, Thatcherism, Johnny’s past, family, the illicit economy, and the two of them in the middle. Then it can fail to hold it. That gave me a beginning, a middle and an end.
I created the following synopsis:
A Synopsis of My Beautiful Laundrette (image created with PowerPoint)
Ninety seconds
The storyboard now runs to about a minute and a half. I am not trying to compress the plot into that. I am trying to compress the meaning.
It starts simply. A pound coin spins in darkness and drops into an old machine. The coin starts the wash and, with it, the story. Money matters in this film: property, enterprise, aspiration and survival circle the characters constantly.
Then Britain goes in. Red, white and blue clothes tumble in the drum, joined by newspaper fragments, keys, pound notes and a whisky glass. These are the competing versions of Britain surrounding Omar: his uncle’s entrepreneurialism on one side, his father’s socialist ideals and disappointment on the other.
A pair of skinhead boots crashes into the washing, which puts Johnny’s past in the sequence without recreating a scene from the film. Omar and Johnny then appear as reflections in the curved glass, drifting towards each other until they overlap.
This is the kind of storytelling I want to try: objects, movement, colour and composition carrying the meaning, rather than illustrating dialogue.
Getting into After Effects: Making an Artefact
The second part of this week’s session moved away from planning and into making. This wasn’t about starting the final title sequence yet. Instead, the task was to get into After Effects and experiment: bring material in, put things on a timeline, change them, animate them and see what happened.
That distinction was useful. I have a tendency to want to know what the finished thing is going to look like before I begin. This exercise encouraged almost the opposite approach: make something first and allow the process to suggest what it might become.
Starting with something rather than nothing
I already had a growing collection of visual experiments around My Beautiful Laundrette. My mood board had established some recurring ingredients: the circular washing-machine door, water and reflections, bubbles, money, red-white-and-blue fabric, South London and the contrast between an ordinary laundrette and an extraordinary inner world. I had also begun pushing those ideas away from straightforward illustration and towards something increasingly abstract. 261005 Motion Graphics Week 3
So rather than opening After Effects and staring accusingly at a blank composition, I had material to play with.
Image: Mood Board – created with Canva
Image: Using Mood Board concepts, created with Runway
The important line in my notes from this stage is:
“Keep going to make it more and more abstract. Not every idea will make the final cut.” (261005 Motion Graphics Week 3)
That is probably as important as anything technical I learned.
Building rather than illustrating
Once the image was inside After Effects, I began to understand the importance of thinking in layers.
A still image might look complete, but motion graphics requires me to start dismantling it mentally. What could move independently? What could appear or disappear? What might rotate, scale, drift, blur or change opacity? What should remain completely still?
The washing machine immediately suggested rotation. Water suggested movement and reflection. Bubbles could drift independently. Light could change. The circular door could reveal another image beneath it.
Suddenly I wasn’t looking at a picture of a laundrette. I was looking at a collection of possible movements.
That feels like a small but significant change in how I am beginning to think about motion graphics.
Experiment first, tidy up later
The exercise also gave me permission to make something that didn’t have to be good. That sounds ridiculous, but it is surprisingly liberating from my fear of all things Adobe.
Rather than trying to reproduce my planned title sequence perfectly, I could test scale, position, timing, keyframes and transitions and discover what each did. Some movements were too fast. Some were too obvious. Some effects added absolutely nothing. Others produced possibilities I hadn’t anticipated.
The point wasn’t necessarily to keep them. The point was to notice them.
It made After Effects feel slightly less like an intimidating piece of professional software and more like a workshop bench: put something down, move it, break it, undo it and try something else.
Story still matters
Alongside the practical experiment, I went back to the synopsis of My Beautiful Laundrette. My notes show that happening almost literally alongside the After Effects work: research into the film sits next to screenshots of the software. (261005 Motion Graphics Week 3)
Screenshots from After Effects Workshop:
These images show a number of the steps I took during James’s workshop and how the final artefact began to emerge:
The laundrette isn’t just an interesting visual location. It is where Omar and Johnny take something neglected and remake it. Around that transformation circulate money, race, class, family, sexuality, enterprise and belonging. (261005 Motion Graphics Week 3)
So an animation of a washing machine spinning can be just that, a washing machine spinning.
Or its contents can become Britain being put through the wash.
That is the difference I am beginning to look for.
Sound as motion
The session also made me think much more seriously about audio. My notes ask what sound could drive the motion of My Beautiful Laundrette, rather than simply accompany it. (261005 Motion Graphics Week 3)
That opens another experimental route.
A coin drops.
Clunk.
The machine switches on.
Click. Hum. Turn.
The drum establishes a rhythm. Water enters. Clothes tumble. Mechanical sounds gradually become musical.
Rather than finishing the animation and then putting music underneath it, I could potentially build some of the movement to the rhythm of the laundrette itself.
My first artefact
By the end of the exercise I had something on the After Effects timeline. The source artwork is no longer simply an image; it has entered a composition, with layers, properties, keyframes and time underneath it. (There is a You Tube video version below in case the embedded version does not function).
This is the outcome of the exercise rather than a finished piece of motion graphics. I’m keeping it here because the roughness matters. It records the point at which the ideas I’ve been collecting about My Beautiful Laundrette actually began to move.
The finished sequence can come later. I found this workshop really useful and while I am not confident that I can bring the finished item I have in my mind to reality, I believe I will be able to make a good effort to produce a title sequence worthy of this excellent film which means a lot to so many.
For now, I made something move — and learned from what it did.
Leave a Reply