CinÉireann May 2018 | Page 46

Mooshku and You: Insight's into Irish animation from Mooshku's Méabh Tammemägi and Dee McDonnell

For the last four years, children’s media company Mooshku have been one of the leading lights in the Irish animation industry, focusing on fun, positive and enriching stories for young children across multiple platforms and working with leading international media partners. They have developed and managed in-house properties as well as offering their skills and expertise to others developing kid’s content across all media, helping to establish a collaborative atmosphere in the industry in Ireland. Méabh and Jason Tammemägi have been at the forefront of Mooshku’s efforts and from her work as a casting/voice director on animated preschool shows like Fluffy Gardens and Planet Cosmo through to being a producer on the international hit kid’s show Little Roy, Méabh has contributed significantly to Ireland’s ever-growing reputation as a hub of animation production.

We spoke with Méabh, alongside Dee McDonnell, background artist at Mooshku and rising talent in Irish animation, about the industry on the island, their inspirations and the that are to come and should come to Irish animation in the years ahead.

How did you first get started in animation?

Méabh: I’m from an ad agency background. I started back in the '90s as a European Account Co-ordinator for Saatchi and Saatchi in London. When I moved back to Dublin in 1998 I moved into an Agency Producer role first for Saatchi’s Dublin office and then as a freelance AP working with lots of different agencies on lots of different brands. I was in advertising for over 10 years and met Jason (Mooshku co-owner) through animated commercials. The production company Jason was working with at the time very soon after moved out of ads and fully into pre-school shows so I watched with great interest as they went through that transition. Fun as advertising was (and it was!), I had made a lot of commercials by then, I had travelled all over the world on shoots, so I felt I had really ticked all those boxes. I didn’t want my career to be all about making loo-roll packs look sexy.  I wanted my work to have more value and to be more personally satisfying.  So, as I saw what was going on with Jason, as his company made the change from ads to preschool TV I was won over: I knew that was where I wanted to be.

 

Dee: When I was in school I wanted to study illustration, and animation seemed to me like the closest thing to a degree in illustration that I could do in Ireland. So I went to IADT Dun Laoghaire and studied animation for four years. It took me a little while to break into the industry, but about a year and a half after I graduated, I started working at Kavaleer Productions as a Prop Artist.

 

What is the best way for animation to catch preschool children's attention and aid in their development?

Words: Luke Dunne

46 CinÉireann / May 2018