here. We did animation and backgrounds here as well. In Canada we got the voice cast. It was originally optioned in Canada by Aircraft Pictures and they were the ones who approached us about it. It was Andrew Rosen from Aircraft Pictures who pitched it to us in New York one year when myself and Gerry [Shirren the Managing Director of Cartoon Saloon] were there.
They had tried to do it as live action and then they saw The Secret of Kells and thought wouldn't it be more interesting to do it for kids in animation. It might be the pill in a way as the storyline is quite dense, but then it's read by that age group, it's read by young adults, and teens, and pre-teens. So Canada did the voice casting because they are all Afghan second-generation or first-generation that did the voices, over 50% of them. Then the final part of it was the compositing which was done with Guru. They did compositing for the whole film. We would have designed the look of the scenes but when it comes to the effects or how they are moved, and to the lighting and colour correction then they would have done that. And all of the paper cut-out sequences. We would have designed the colours and the flat layers, but they added a whole extra level of techniques and compositing and their skills to make it look like real paper. The sound mix was from there and the composers Mychael and Jeff Danna were Canadian, and then the whole post was done there. Then in Luxembourg it was a portion of the animation and backgrounds.
You had worked with Luxembourg before.
Yes we had worked on Song of the Sea before with Studio 352. They raised money to in Luxembourg. They raised their own budget for that. It's a great country to co-produce with as their financing is very simple. There's basically one source and the guy that we work with has always been very successful in raising funding.
We also seem to have a great relationship with Canada for co-productions due to our treaty with them.
It was great because during one of the Toronto Film Festivals the Irish Film Board expressed their support for the film and were able to sit down with us with the Canadian film funders. Of course it was a Candian author and a Canadian book so they were going to be on-board. It was nice how the two of us worked together.
Even though it has that hand-drawn aesthetic it's all done in computers now so that must make it easier to do the big international co-productions.
Yes. Absolutely. Before on The Secret of Kells we animated it all on paper and we had to get rough animation... there are a few different stages in 2D animation, you do key animation, then rough passes, and then rough animation, which is like you might imagine rough pencil drawings when you are trying to get the shapes. Sometimes the same person might try to clean up their own work, but normally you have clean-up artists and a clean-up team that is working to clean up the lines and making them look like the rest of the lines in the film with the thicknesses and all that. So we had to send boxes of paper to Brazil on The Secret of Kells and then back to Hungary for clean-up, and then back to Ireland for compositing and things like that, which was really expensive. And you couldn't see what was being done so you'd have to have somebody in Brazil, a supervisor there, and then somebody in Hungary who could check the work. Now that it's all digital that's certainly speeded things up. But Nora, even though she was sick during part of the production, she would be sitting with a laptop, or on her computer, and could she work coming from anywhere. She could even be over in Luxembourg checking something and receiving work from Canada using a software called Shotgun which builds an edit of the film as you go along. Things are filled in and then any scene or sequence can be looked up to see how the work is going and then approved digitally from a screen anywhere. You just log into a cloud based system. Of course that really helps when it comes to a film like this. But it still doesn't beat a bit of human interaction which we would still do quite often just to make sure that the teams are well gelled together and know each other. The animator over the shoulder is still the ultimate. It's still great to have that. It's becoming less frequent as you can still engage with Skype and you can talk while seeing the same work on your own screen, but we'd still have supervisors travelling over and saying hello and meeting the teams. Even on Song of the Sea we would have had the whole background team over to Sligo where we hung around for a few days in a castle over there. It was really beautiful.Then they stayed for a while in Kilkenny and then went back to Luxembourg. It got them used to our work ethic and the tone that we have. We try to do that as much as possible.
CinÉireann / May 2018 25