American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 10) Short Takes A Graphic Novel Becomes a Striking Short by Iain Stasukevich ndy was supposed to see Colleen that day, but he never called her back. Instead, he wrote her a letter. It had been six years since they’d seen each other, and his tangled emotions and disturbing recollections became the basis of his epistle. The source material for the short film A Letter to Colleen was a graphic novel penned by Andy London, a 20page handwritten letter accompanied by five pages of drawings and printed in a fanzine format. It’s a story of angst, confusion, shame and sex told from Andy’s point of view, and it sold out its first and only run of 100 copies in 1992. Four years later, London’s girlfriend and future wife, Carolyn Adelman, read the story, “and it hit me like a ton of bricks,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Andy, we need to make a film out of this.’” At the time, the couple was living in the Czech Republic, making ends meet as English teachers. When they moved back to New York, Andy continued to work on graphic novels, and Carolyn wrote and produced Off-OffBroadway shows and worked as a burlesque dancer. Neither had dabbled in filmmaking, but in 1998, they began to produce live-action and animated short films. Four shorts and a number of commercials later, Andy hit a creative wall. “I wanted to do something kind of different, something more adult,” he says. It seemed the right time to revisit A Letter to Colleen. “We both needed a certain amount of creative and emotional maturity to turn it into something that would be entertaining and not just gratuitous,” explains Carolyn, referring to the film’s darker moments. “There’s a haze of alcohol- and druginduced energy that allows things to A To take A Letter to Colleen from the page to the screen, filmmakers Andy and Carolyn London shot live-action footage with a consumer-grade Digital-8 camera, edited in Final Cut Pro, and then rotoscoped each frame in Macromedia Flash using a Wacom tablet. 10 February 2008 Photos courtesy of Andy and Carolyn London.
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