To the Waters and the Wild

Recently we took a trip with the whole crew to Sligo to see some of the sights that inspired our film.
We had visitors from our Luxembourg coproduction studio 352 and some new recruits in the Saloon. It was good to show our Belgian, French , Luxembourg and Hungarian friends some of the West of Ireland.
We stayed in Markree Castle in Sligo and went walking near Ben Bulben.
 We even visited W.B.Yeats grave to pay our respects.

Here are some photos by various Salooners of the trip. The photos and memories will surely fuel us  thru the year making backgrounds , animation and designs based on the landscape we saw.

Producer Paul Young surveys his domain

Everyone bundled back onto the bus

Salooners take breakfast in the manner in which they are accustomed to.

Pangur Ban showed up to wish us luck - or maybe ask for a bit part.

Producing animated films is a lonely road.

Paul Young , as ever, pointing the way . (straight off a cliff it seems here though)

Backgrounds

We have had two background painters from Luxembourg join our team to train for a few weeks lately.
Its lovely to see the watercolour basis for the bgs being painted before they go into photoshop .

Heres a lovely wip by one of our Irish bg painters Ciaran Duffy - and a shot if art director Adrien merigeau showing laurence and pascal from 352 the technique he used for making the bgs .

Holidays

Well 2012 is coming to a close , the studio is closed for the Christmas holidays and everyone is taking a well earned break.
What a year it's been, we finally closed the finance and started preproduction after almost five years of development. We recorded the voices and finished the animatic. We designed most of the films locations and have just about all the character modelsheets done.

Lately we screened the 84 minute cut of the animatic to groups of 8-10 year old schoolkids.
The feedback was reassuring and fun to hear.
All of them enjoyed and understood the story even in its rough black and white form.
It was a long year of rewrites, redrawing and re recording but I think it's left us with a strong blueprint to build our film on next year.
It was especially fun to hear that the kids sang along to the songs and laughed at the right places. Some tears were also reported at the sad parts!
They were given questionnaires to fill out afterwards and those make for some valuable reference as we plough ahead into production.

We have been joined by a great artist lately in the bg dept- Ciaran Duffy , who has been helping our team create the key bgs, also Jeremy Purcell has been designing the water and waves and doing lovely animation tests.

We have a big influx of new artists in the new year , from our partner studios and new hires to bolster our Inhouse team.
We have some old friends and amazing a new talents joining us so I'm really looking forward to it.

Posing,layout, animation and efx all kick off in January and February , it's going to be a whirlwind so I'm having a few lazy days now over Christmas in preparation for the weeks and months of early starts and late nights ahead.

To enliven my wordy post here is an old 2011 concept of a contemplative Conor - characters by myself and colours by Adrien Merigeau ...

Ernest and Celestine

 Finally this beautiful film was released yesterday.
produced by our old friends at Les Armateurs in coproduction with our coproducers on Song of the Sea Studio 352 and Digital Graphics.

I was lucky enough to see it in Annecy.
Its already one of my favourite animated features - its just perfect.

The talented young director Benjamin Renner has a hilarious blog too -

http://reineke.canalblog.com/



Go and see it !


http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2012/12/11/ernest-et-celestine-s-en-vont-au-cinema_1804664_3246.html