Page 9 - Fujifilm Exposure_3 Michael Winner_ok

MAKING TRACKS WITH
MAKING TRACKS WITH
THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE
THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE
The Continuing Story Of A Children’s Favourite
A merica, of course, has Disney. France has Asterix. And Britain? Well, Thomas The Tank Engine is fast steaming down the tracks from child- hood favourite to worldwide enter- tainment phenomenon, thanks to a beautifully made TV series that has beguiled children and adults alike since it first began chugging past the cameras way back in
1983.
Produced by Britt Allcroft, directed by David
Mitton and co-written by them both, the five- minute adventures have blossomed from a domes- tic hit into a lucrative brand that takes in toys, foodstuffs, duvet covers and videos.
And behind it all, the series keep coming, with David Mitton currently at work filming the fifth, 26 five-minute episodes that take over six months to make, and which should be on our screens next autumn. It is, in all respects, a thoroughly British, if rather unexpected success story.
“I always had a feeling that Thomas was going to be popular,” Scots-born Mitton explains, “because I knew so many people still loved train sets. All those steam buffs I’d met over the years were just the sort of people who buy programmes for TV stations. But one thought of it more parochially in those days; the market in 1983 was not as experienced in merchandising and global licensing as it is today.
“The dream of course was to try to crack America, but there’s no way we thought it would become as colossal as it is today. The response from America, Australia and Japan shows that it just touches peoples’ hearts. I didn’t think it was going to be quite so well received, I don’t think Britt did either, although we obviously hoped for it.”
Apart from the sheer charm of the late Reverend Wilbert Awdry’s original stories, a big part of the success comes down to the production quality. These days Mitton tends to oversee the day-to-day shooting while Allcroft looks after the global operation of her expanding company, which
has recently added Captain Pugwash to its titles. Filmed at Shepperton, the operation is every bit as slick and sophisticated as any feature film, with a team of skilled modelmakers and craftsmen creating the island of Sodor, the safe world of
Thomas The Tank Engine and his friends.
It is not too far away from the familiar train railway sets of our childhood, more solid perhaps, certainly more expensive, but working to the stan- dard 1:32 scale. And as the various mechanical characters go about their adventures they are filmed with a special camera that Mitton designed
with his Director of Photography, Terry Permane. “When we were still doing commercials in the early ‘80s we were getting exasperated with stan- dard lenses and equipment not achieving what we wanted,” Mitton explains. “So we developed this lens, which had a one inch to infinity range, and we didn’t need to worry about the light. Then when Britt presented me with the Thomas books I felt this was the way we should film it, what we call LAMA - Live Action Model Animation - which relied on the skills of the modelmakers, and the mecha- nisms that we could put into those engines to
achieve what we really wanted.”
Adapting each engine character on a standard
Gauge One chassis made by respected model train makers Märklin, the personalities are added by means of a variety of detachable faces. These have different combinations of eye and mouth expres- sions, creating a rich array of moods and person- alities for the characters, personalities that Mitton explains he knows very well.
“I’m pushed into playing about 28 charac- ters,” he chuckles, “which bodes well for the psy- chiatrist’s couch. I am the actor in lots of ways although at other times I feel as if I’m the Fat Controller too.”
As well as refining the technology of model filmmaking, Mitton and his team have adapted the available model trains to suit their needs. Finding, for example, that the steam produced by the Märklin engines was too light to show up on film,
they devised an ingenious system whereby the engine puffed out Titanium Chloride which turns to gas upon contact with the air, and therefore looks like steam on film. Similarly the bellows in the original models were not sufficiently strong to pump out the ‘steam’ realistically. The solution was to replace the bellows with the fingertips of rubber gloves! Ingenuity always reigns supreme.
No problem at all seems insurmountable for Allcroft’s Thomas team, who take up the whole of Stage F at Shepperton Studios. They also occupy an accompanying workshop where the various sections of scenery, houses and signal boxes are created to order, and - just as in a real film - assem- bled as ‘locations’ in which every sequence set there can be filmed in one go.
Next to the engines, the human characters play merely a supporting role, but they seem con- tent, waiting patiently in their boxes until called upon. For the action scenes they are lead cast models, with their various facial expressions painted on, but there are also larger wooden fig- ures for those all important close ups.
Similarly the main engines, Thomas and his fellow stars, exist in small and large scale, and when they are not in use reside in the plush com- fort of a foam lined steel box, each with their name printed on the outside. It is only as much as stars of their enormous stature properly deserve, and Mitton is not slow to recognise the intense plea- sure derived from working with them.
“I started out on my lengthy and varied career on Thunderbirds way back in the ‘60s,” he recalls, “that really kicked me off in a big way, and I’ve never really recovered - I’m still playing with toys some thirty odd years later! But I learned so much from those days, and even when I see the rushes today, seeing Thomas on the screen is amazing. Hopefully I’ll still be doing this when I’m on one of those zimmer frames.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Thomas The Tank Engine was photographed by Terry Permane and originated on