Terry Pratchett's
MORT
a story of Discworld
(the unauthorized adaptation)
Terry Pratchett's
MORT
a story of Discworld
(the unauthorized adaptation)
An animated film with the voices of:
Wow! So you made a kind of movie of my book without asking me and now
some damn university thinks they own all the rights to it? Really?
Sounds like a great day in court!
...just kidding...
It sounds like fun, but even so, I don't want to see it. You'll
probably look back on it in years to come and wish you hadn't shown me.
Let it remains to glitter unseen.
--
Terry Pratchett
Garrett had shot one student film with dialogue in it (Stripped Away), and for his fifth and final student film, Garrett would have to go back to telling a story without dialogue. That was the plan, anyway. He wrote something called "Of Sound Mind" about a sound technician on a Hollywood film that is having so many problems the technician begins to lose his mind. Well, the script sucked and the lead actor didn't show up, and it looked like Garrett wouldn't be able to make anything at all before the deadline hit.
Which is why, very late at night just days before his assignment would be due, Garrett decided to adapt a favorite Discworld book of his, "Mort."
A few more cuts were made, and the voices were recorded exactly as scripted, in a marathon evening session that lasted all night up to 7 in the morning. Luckily, the cast was up to it, and John McCulloch made a perfect Mort. Many many DV tapes were run through, and sadly as the cast ran out of tape, the raw footage from some earlier student films was taped over (though not Stripped Away). Garrett recorded his own voice work as Death last, trying hard to achieve an appropriately gravelly tone, very critical of his own performance. He was very tired, and wore his throat out quick. An echo would later be added to the voice in post-production, as stipulated in the original Discworld novels [where DEATH SPEAKS IN ALL CAPITALS]. After all that, Death remains one of Garrett's favorite characters he's ever played.
Still, there was no time left for Garrett to shoot all the animation he wanted to create. He was, however, able to animate a 5-minute demo scene (the assassination of the King of Sto Lat) using a borrowed camera. This scene introduced Mort and Death (it is the opening scene of the film), and screened in class as Garrett's 5th student film. The class loved it, and so Garrett was able, in the remaining few weeks of class before summer, try to put visuals to all the audio he had. As Garrett worked, "Mort" got longer and longer, more and more epic. He kept adding scenes. Well, school ended, and Garrett never did finish all of "Mort" that he wanted to. But he finished a lot of it. Mort was actually released unfinished, but the next semester Garrett returned to it, slapped on an ending and called it finished. This ending scene was created entirely on the computer - no actual shooting was done for it. Voice tracks remain for many scenes that were never animated.
Note: USC owns all the student films, so they are not distributed to the public, shown or sold. Nor do any of these pages contain any actual images from the movies or their production (all the artwork on this page is taken from my collection of art I did for the film - photos taken just for this page, not from the movie).
There is an edit on practically every other frame of the film. Footage was reedited so that the lips would match the dialogue. Some scenes, like the garden scene with Mort and Ysabell, were edited from very little footage (as the sun was going down). Other scenes, like Death in the bar, were actually edited down, as Garrett overshot. Garrett says the scene with Death and Albert looking over the books was created with "no shot footage at all, just special effects." Each character's dialogue was recorded separately, and edited together later.
Art Balteria's character "Harga" was drawn to match him as well, but the Harga scene was never shot or edited into the film.
