There's kind of an interesting story about the difference between digital and traditional. We had a load of boxes of animation pages piled up outside our server room in the Maltings building when we were making Song of the Sea. They were supposed to be shipped up to Trinity College for archiving. We had a flood over the Christmas. A burst pipe had happened and somebody left a tap on, so of course the water came flooding out. And all of Song of the Sea was in the server room on the server, because it was digital, but the paper animation of The Secret of Kells soaked up the water and saved the server. So traditional animation saved the digital one from disaster.
Kilkenny seems to have embraced you. You have the exhibition in the Butler Gallery and the new Animation Festival.
We love living down here. There are certain advantages and disadvantages. Certainly when it came to crewing. It was sometimes harder to find crew from Ireland to come down here because we are the only game in town. There was a certain point when myself and Tomm [Moore co-founder and director of The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea] asked ourselves do we need set up somewhere in Dublin as well, or somewhere in London ,and we kept thinking about it. Eventually we just said "Feck it, lets try and bring them all here and make it more interesting to be in Kilkenny". We did a deal with Mercury Filmworks from Canada, who were interested in setting up a studio in Ireland, and we convinced them to come to Kilkenny to set up their studio. So that we would have another studio in town and that somebody working here didn't feel like we were the only game in town. That they would have another ship to swim to if they wanted to or if work dried up on a particular post then they could go across town to another studio, which is what it is like in Dublin a little bit. Although there's so much work now that everybody is holding on to everyone that they have. back then you might have had more shorter term jobs where people might need to take a couple of months off before the next project starts. So now we have Lighthouse here which is a joint venture. We did it in partnership with Mercury, who are an excellent studio in Canada and does a lot of work for Disney and Amazon and the big players over there. There's now two studios in Kilkenny with us jointly owning Lighthouse. So now there's nearly 200 animators in Kilkenny and we can create more of a buzz around
26 CinÉireann / May 2018