Boards

Lately  Fabian Erlinghauser (who is working with me as AD as well as looking after another important Saloon project right now) has started filing and organizing all my sketches and "beatboards" that I drew on paper with pencils and brush pens while we worked on the animatic.
I've posted a few of them here with  a few thoughts on the story boarding process .

I've been really lucky to have  Nora Twomey working as "Head of Story" - shes editing , drawing boards, doing scratch voices , helping with rewrites as well as advising on music and sound effects - whew.
Nora of course co-directed The Secret of Kells and she is a partner here in Cartoon Saloon .


All summer Daniel Christenson was working with us on the first pass animatic contributing lots of ideas and suggestions with his storyboards.
 I've also been lucky enough to work with Alessandra Sorrentino who did a lot of key animation on The Secret of Kells on some important sequences,
Etienne Willem from our partner studio in Luxembourg has been doing some great work too and Julien Regnard who has ended up boarding a huge amount of the film , working from my scrawls to build up a working animatic.
Our animation supervisor Sean McCarron storyboarded a couple of sequences  too and early on Rosa Ballester a great designer and board artist helped out as well.

Making the animatic has been a long iterative process where myself and the team draw up a version of the sequence ,then we edit it and put some scratch voices on and try to analysis whats working, whats not working and then start drawing again.
To divide the work I prepare these "beatboards" either as kicking off images I want to see in the movie or as suggestions for retakes.
I think I may be misusing the term"beatboards" actually...but basically I would ask the artists to find ways to work these images or ideas into the sequence, sometimes they last right to the end sometimes they fall away very quickly as we find better solutions in the process of making the animatic.
I did thumbnails for each sequence in the script as well  - trying to give a frame work to build on.

We are nearing the deadline now to finish up and move on to layout. There are a number of sequences still in progress and I really wish we could have another few months to revise and rework everything but the train is leaving the station now.

I've been so lucky this time out that I got a lot of feedback on the first pass animatic from friends in the industry and their notes have really helped tighten up the whole thing.
Will Collins the screenwriter has skyped in on a few story meetings to help us out of tricky spots and has been invaluable giving notes and feedback.

Our biggest challenge over the next few weeks is to edit it down to 85 minutes maximum from the current 97.
We are recording some of the final voices this week in Ardmore and hopefully with those we can start to lock sequences for layout.

Its a challenging ,fascinating and frustrating process and I have come to the conclusion that the film is basically working or not at the rough animatic stage.

 I'm heartened by the fact that a number of people who saw an early assemblage of the animatic said they enjoyed it , understood it and some people have even found it already quite emotionally resonant at certain parts.

Nora's young son repeatedly asks to see it when he is in the studio as well.

Given that its just scribbly black and white drawings with scratch music and voices , I'm hopeful we are at least going in the right direction.

Merigeau and Friends

We have begun to build  a great Scene illustration/Key Bg team around the very talented Mr. Merigeau.
So far we have been joined by Lily Bernard - another Secret of Kells Key Bg artist http://randomness.canalblog.com/, Amelie Flechais http://ssoja.blogspot.ie/ and Mr.Steve McCarthy http://mrstevemccarthy.blogspot.ie/.

A talented bunch to be sure .
Its so lovely to look from desk to desk and screen to screen and see the world of the film evolving in ink , paint , pencil and photoshop .

We have also been joined this week by our Danish coproducer Frederik Villumsen http://www.norlum.dk/ who is helping out on modelsheets and Janos Szabo http://janos-szabo.blogspot.ie/ , an talented guy from Hungary who animated in Kecskemet Film on The Secret of Kells.

Its exciting times...

Song of the Sea

Lately Bruno Coulais has started sending me ideas for the theme song , the Song of the Sea , its a pleasure to hear the various melodys he is trying out.

Today Colm from Kila will begin to work on combining his lyrics with Brunos melody and hopefully some of the same magic that happened with our last collaboration will happen again ;-)

Its lovely to work again with Kila and Bruno on the music, even though Song of the Sea is a different film and not a sequel to the Secret of Kells, we hope to retain some of best elements of that production and make a new project that has some of the same artistic signature styles.

cutting

I'm reworking a sequence today that means we have to cut one of my favorite images created during development..its the right thing to do to tighten and strengthen the story but its always sad ....so in  its honor here is the concept by Ross Stewart that I am sorry to see go.

Jon Kenny

It was great to meet up with Jon today and chat about the characters he will be playing in the film.
Amazingly he is currently sporting a bushy beard just like Ferry Dan's !
He is appearing on stage in "The Field" and has grown the beard for the part.

Definitely one of the nicest things about making our own projects is the chance to work with artists we admire . We have all been huge fans of Jon for years and its exciting to have him involved .

Voices

 David Rawle as Ben.

With the biggest part in the movie being a 10 year old boy it was crucial to find the right voice.
We auditioned several talented young actors , and settled on David Rawle.
David recently starred in the Sky Tv series " Mooneboy"which Cartoon Saloon provided animated segments for and we  were very impressed with his performance, especially his comic timing.
We are really lucky to be working with this in demand young actor , we even had to delay the first records since Mooneboy has already gone to a second season!

 Lisa Hannigan as Bronach.

As this is a small but crucial part that requires both singing as well as acting we were especially lucky to be able to cast Lisa Hannigan in this role. She is one of my favourite singers and currently making waves internationally so its really exciting to have her involved.

 Fionnula Flanagan as Granny.

 Fionnula Flanagan was someone we identified very early on as a potential voice for Granny and another important character in the film. Will and I were lucky enough to have lunch with her while we were out in LA around the time of the 2010 Oscars. She agreed back then to play both parts and was even kind enough to invite us and our families to her house for tea ! I'm really looking forward to finally recording the part after such a long wait.

Jon Kenny as Ferry Dan.

Jon Kenny is playing both Ferry Dan and another important character in the film. We are all huge fans of Jon since our college days when "D'Unbelievables" first hit the scene.
Jon is not just a funny guy but also a great actor and musician so he's really perfect for the part.
He played the part of the storyteller in Tod Polsons short "The Gingerbread Man" and once I saw that I realised he has a perfect voice for animation.
He also played the part of (Cartoon Saloon Producer) Paul Young in that short film so he is practically already a Salooner ! :)


Not all the parts are shown here and we still have auditions this week for the part of Saoirse , but the recording starts in two weeks so we are finalising the dialogue and songs and scrabbling to finish up the revisions on the boards for the first recordings.

I'm nervous of course but past experience has shown me that when you have such seasoned and talented actors its an enjoyable and fascinating process to record the voices.

Until now we have been working with scratch voices by my talented partners in crime Nora Twomey and Paul Young - both pretty impressive actors in their own right as well as artists and everything else.

Nora will be voice directing with me and I'm glad we have Kairen Wailloch helping with the casting and the voice record co-ordination, its the same team from The Secret of Kells - hard to believe that record took place 6 years ago now!

In just a month or two we will have a much clearer feeling for how our characters will perform and sound and can begin testing lip sync and so on with the final actors voices.

Holy Wells

Two films that really influenced Song of the Sea are "My Neighbour Totoro" and "Into the West".

When Will Collins and I were developing the script and story we always wanted a quiet moment in the rain ,where we took a little breather for a minute.

Those moments are what I love most about Hayao Miyazakis work.

For a long time we had the kids shelter under a dolmen in a  homage to the bit in Totoro where the little girls shelter from the rain in a Shinto shrine.
Those little insights to Japanese culture give such a depth to the setting and the world the film is set in, even if they are not explained or referred to in the context of the story.

As the story evolved we hit on the idea of this "shelter" actually being a gateway to another world , hidden from the mundane everyday we live in.

I have always been fascinated by HolyWells, where people come to pray and often leave totems or "offerings" of the person they are praying for.
This strangely public remnant of someones deepest concerns is often quite touching when you visit one especially if its a photo or personal effect of some sort from a long time ago.
I find my self wondering if the person who made the prayer found comfort or if their loved one ever recovered.

There are often Rag Trees near Holy Wells too - where someone who wants a loved one be healed in some way will tie a piece of their clothing to the tree with the belief that when the rag rots away the illness will be cured.

Often these places have an ancient significance that  early Irish Christainity merely appropriated .

The link with water and our own childhood memories of being taken to pray at these special places made us decide to change the "gateway" from a  dolmen to a Holywell.


Here are some storyboards by Julien Regnard and concepts by Adrien Merigeau for the Holy Well seq. which we are currently working on .

Here we go again

I finally got around to starting this new blog to track my personal journey thru directing a second animated feature film.
I had started one back 2008 which became a private place for crew and investors to share artwork and ideas during development.

I enjoyed keeping "The Blog of Kells" during and after making "The Secret of Kells" so I will try to document the process of this new film here.
I hope the fans who followed "The Blog of Kells" will join me again for this new adventure.

In the last few weeks the finance finally closed and the production has begun to really kick off - with all the pressure and stress that implies.
Thankfully I have a great team around me including many friends from The Secret of Kells .

We are presently finalizing the animatic and  making model sheets , animation tests , layouts and location designs .. its a hectic and fun time.


Just to have a few pictures on the first post I added a few concepts I made from the trailer we did back in 2009.
The story has  changed a lot and the design has evolved over the years but I feel at its core we are still moving towards the cartoon I wanted to make back then.

"A Melancholy Musical Comedy for Kids"