Dave McKean loved the challenge of his first feature film, but some of the actors found their roles a little strange, he tells Steve Pratt.

ARTIST and illustrator turned director Dave McKean had unusual instructions for the stars of his first feature film MirrorMask. Stephen Fry was asked politely to keep as still as he possibly could as his head was filmed as he spoke his lines. Only his lips are seen in the fantasy film, being screened during Animex, the annual animation and computer games festival organised by Teesside University and running all this week.

Fry completed his filming in record time - just 17 minutes. "He did the whole thing twice and was on the phone to his mother in between," says McKean. "Lenny Henry was a bit slower, he took 19 minutes."

The movie was designed and directed by McKean, and has a screenplay by long-time collaborator Neil Gaiman. Stephanie Leonidas stars as a 15-year-old girl who longs to run away from the family circus and takes a fantastic journey into the Dark Lands, populated by giants, monkeybirds and dangerous sphinxes. As well as Fry and Henry, the cast features North-East actress Gina McKee and Marion And Geoff star Rob Brydon.

The chance to make a movie came out of the blue for McKean. "I'd done a couple of short films, but they were really like home movies," he says.

Then came a call from Lisa Henson, daughter of Muppet creator Jim Henson. She had an opening with a movie company to do a fantasy film, like previous Henson movies Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

"She'd seen my short films and asked me. I was talking to Neil about a BBC TV series at the time, but all the planets lined up and it seemed like a good opportunity," recalls McKean.

The film mixes live action with digital animation. McKean calls it "a very simple process" although actors had to get accustomed to working without sets or props. Most of the live action was shot against a blue screen and backgrounds added later.

"I storyboarded the whole film, planned every shot before we started shooting. Then I sat down with the actors, the director of photography and all the technical people to show them everything that was going to happen - and I tried to do impersonations of all the monsters."

The process called for actors to release their imagination to picture what was happening in the scene they were performing. "Stephanie took about a day and then she got it. She could see everything, she was wonderful. The others did well but struggled a bit more.

"Gina McKee was the most experienced actress but had never done a special effects film before. She knew film and could see what the rhythm was going to be, but never quite got the gist of this one.

"It's strange saying, 'today you're going to be a 60ft floating head'. She found this a bit of a challenge."

McKean shot everything with a completely static camera, meaning he could work fast, doing 40 or 50 set-ups a day as there were no sets to light. Footage of the actors was put into a 3D space in the computer, where the virtual sets were built and lit. "Then you get the virtual camera and start making the film," he says.

Pretty much anything is possible, but he wasn't interested so much in photo-realism as making something that looked like a drawing. "It's not real," he says. "Unlike if you're trying to do a CG (computer-generated) wolf - we know what it looks like and notice if there's a whisker."

Location filming in London and Brighton was followed by several weeks' blue screen studio work. The planned eight months of animation and post-production turned into 17 months "but we still arrived a squeak under budget".

He and Gaiman have worked together on projects for 18 years but MirrorMask entailed different methods. "I knew where the money should go and there were things Neil was planning that I knew would really cause us problems," says McKean.

"I didn't necessarily want to write it, but I wanted to be in the room when he did. It made me realise we work in different ways and have different attitudes to fantasy."

Lisa Henson lent them her home for brainstorming sessions. "It was like two weeks of therapy in the Henson house - neutral territory surrounded by Kermits and Miss Piggys," says McKean.

MirrorMask has given McKean a taste to do more movies. "This one feels like film school to me. I had to learn pretty much from scratch and made every mistake in the book," he admits. "I'd like to make a film that really feels like mine. Having got to know a couple of film directors, it seems like a life-long thing and that you never get to make your perfect film.

"With illustrations, it's different because I'm in complete control and any mistakes are mine. I can just get on and do it. It's not so chaotic. With the chaos of film, it's like trying to control the weather."

* MirrorMask (PG) shows at Stockton Arc on Saturday at 8pm as part of Animex, Middlesbrough's International Festival of Animation and Computer Games. The film goes on general release on March 3.