Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss

Post by **krt** » October 16th, 2006, 1:00 am

Phil Nibbelink, veteran Disney animator on “The Fox and the Hound”, “The Black Cauldron”, “Basil the Great Mouse Detective”, “Oliver and Company”, and directing animator on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit", has made a 78 min 2D feature animated film all by himself!

Film is called “Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss” and is going to release Oct 27th in select theaters.

He animated all 112,000 drawings on a graphic tablet, He recorded the dialogue in his basement studio using himself, his children and friends for the voices.

Film website: http://www.romeoandjulietfilm.com/index.html

Release theaters: http://www.romeoandjulietfilm.com/release.html

More on this: http://www.animationnation.com/ubb/ulti ... 1;t=011767

Post by **James** » October 16th, 2006, 1:52 am

Wow! I've made fun of this film every time I hear about it based on the little we've seen. But for a one man effort it suddenly seems very impressive! They need to market this this way to really get people interested in it since the story by itself may turn some people off.

Post by **krt** » October 16th, 2006, 3:10 am

I think we should try to support this film and Phil in any way we can, spreading word and encouraging people to go and see it. Also I think this should be on the A-N Frontpage.

More from Phil:

"Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss
A Paperless, Peopleless Studio

After animating at Disney Studios for 10 years and directing animated features for Steven Spielberg for 9, I wanted to break out on my own. I decided to make my own Disney style, 2D, fully animated 35mm feature film…all by myself.

An animated feature takes hundreds of people and costs millions of dollars. I just had me. So I figured if I could make a drawing every 2 minutes, I could make a feature in four and half years. I chose to do Romeo & Juliet as an underwater adventure because aqua dynamics has sculpted marine life into very smooth shapes. And the lack of line mileage on fish and seals enabled me to draw the characters very quickly.

I experimented with animating on paper. But you have to trace and paint cells or scan the paper and paint it digitally. Either way I’d never finish my movie. So I started looking at software. I tried them all. I’d always had a lot of success with Deluxe-Paint on the Amiga. But I was shooting for 2K files. And 2K 24bit bitmaps are big and don’t playback real time on small computers. I had to go vector. And Flash 4 was just the thing.

I did a small test animation with Flash and output 2048 x 1234 bmp’s to my used 35mm film recorder. When I projected it on the big screen I was amazed. No jaggies! No rastering! No banding! Just smooth sub-pixel anti-aliased lines and pure color shapes. What a relief! I was off and running.

The characters were drawn with a Wacom tablet directly into Flash and I did the backgrounds in Painter. Everything was composited in Flash including the camera mechanics. I loved the fact that I could create a digital multiplane, where each character, overlay or background could move independently. And I could get elaborate 3 dimensional effects with 2D artwork. The ocean waves were produced with shape tweening and masks.

I output small avi files to cut with sound into Vegas Audio. And that sound was then burned to a CD and used to create the optical track."

Post by **krt** » October 28th, 2006, 1:43 am

I'm disapointed to see that Animated News decided not to put any news from this film on their front page while other publications like Animation Magazine http://animationmagazine.net/ were very supportive of this 2D feature film.

I dont know why you guys are against this movie and I don't care, your job as true journalists is to echo ALL news related to animation without any censorship or prejudice. I'm not in any way connected to Phil or this movie, but as an animator I understand the huge effort it takes to make a feature all by yourself and the support it needs from us to do well out there in theaters.

Post by **Josh** » October 28th, 2006, 2:16 am

We at Animated News are not against Romeo and Juliet, krt. I apologize if it seemed that way to you.

Do you have a press release for the film? If you do, please send it to mickey@animated-news.com. I'll make sure it makes the front page on Monday, when we have our most readers.

Post by **krt** » October 28th, 2006, 3:03 am

thanks for the reply, mickey. I sent the press release plus some more info about the film to your email address

Post by **Josh** » October 28th, 2006, 3:10 am

Thank you very much, krt. I'll be glad to post all the material you sent to me.

Update: I've also posted a reminder for Sealed with a Kiss on today's front page. That way, folks close to a theater showing the film will remember to see Sealed this weekend.

Post by **Meg** » October 28th, 2006, 1:35 pm

Phil Nibbelink makes me feel lazy.

Post by **Groaning** » October 28th, 2006, 1:49 pm

I can't believe that this man did the whole movie by himself!!! That's amazing.

Post by **Daniel** » October 28th, 2006, 3:08 pm

Neither can I!

It looks really well drawn. And I'm surprised this film hasn't gottan more attention, Disney hire him!

Post by **Dacey** » October 28th, 2006, 4:43 pm

This is "Romeo and Juliet" with SEALS?!?!?

That's even more insane than the gnomes!

Post by **Meg** » October 28th, 2006, 8:29 pm

And I'm surprised this film hasn't gottan more attention, Disney hire him!

Phil Nibbelink, veteran Disney animator on “The Fox and the Hound”, “The Black Cauldron”, “Basil the Great Mouse Detective”, “Oliver and Company”, and directing animator on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit", has made a 78 min 2D feature animated film all by himself!

Post by **Daniel** » October 28th, 2006, 8:47 pm

I feel real dumb now

I take it back than, I guess I missed that when I was reading about it

He still did a good job, cool that he was a part of Disney, you could see it being disneyish.

Post by **Ben** » October 29th, 2006, 3:36 pm

One of the press releases contained some suspect information. It was stated that "We're Back!" was "the sequel to Land Before Time"...

This looks pretty cool. I like the way Phil shaped the story and characters toward what he could knew he could achieve, and it all has the fluidity that we would expect.

I wish Phil well and hope the film does good business theatrically and, more importantly, on home video. Buena Vista or Anchor Bay should pick it up!

Post by **Daniel** » October 29th, 2006, 8:37 pm

Ben wrote:One of the press releases contained some suspect information. It was stated that "We're Back!" was "the sequel to Land Before Time"...

? That's odd, how could anyone make that mistake. Maybe because they both had.....dinasours