Great External Links

So a couple of new things have been posted to the World Wide Web recently that are worth checking out.

The official french Brendan and the Secret of Kells trailer has been posted to the ever expanding YouTube and can be found here. 

Its great to see the snowdrops in full flow, after all the people who worked on them.

And in the world of shorts, the award winning Nora Twomey has started up a blog where you can see two of her films in full. It brings back alot of memories watching From Darkness.  :)

A New Little Project

So the recent Junior Film Fleadh has just finished here in Galway, the last film was shown on Saturday 15th Nov. But not only were there films shown at the festival but before each film there was shown the promo animation produced by ourselves. It was a piece we created in Apple's Motion and told the story of the magic of cinema coming from the projector to the screen.

It's Official

We have finally gone officially into production our new co-production Miss Remarkable and her Career, although we did start animation a month ago we wanted to wait to announce it until we had put pen to paper on our Bord Scannan na hEireann contracts, which we did last week. And thanks again to Orla for all her help.

Miss R is a co-production between ourselves, Lisbet Gabrielsson Film AB (Sweden) and Bullitt Film (Denmark) and is based on the graphic novel of the same name from Joanna Rubin Dranger, who is also directing it. We are producing 75% of the animation here under the guidance of David Rylander of Rylander Animation based in Sweden. So there is alot of skype and emailing going on. But we are also responsible for the english voice record which we are planning for early December.

A little history on our involvement is that myself and Lorrain met Lisbet, Joanna and David at Cartoon Forum last year and have been putting the co-production together for the last 6 months, and thanks to Barry O Donaghue of Barley Films for his immense help there.

I shall post some images and production photos soon.

Looking for Animators

We are currently looking for Animators. We will be holding animation tests in house and the project will be in Anime Studio Pro. Please send your details to jobs(at)amanandink.com.

(Edited Comment) Thanks to all the people that have sent in their stuff but we have all the animators we need for now, thanks again.

Wulfie Animation - win the race

Here is a looping clip of one of the scenes from the Wulfie Trailer. I thought I would post it to show the different stages in the process all in one scene. 

Most of the characters are in the key animation stage, with the turtle animated in Anime Studio with his shell a line version and his skin textured. The skin works really well and is easily achievable in Anime Studio, hence the reason we are going with it, but as the case with alot of computer generated animation its just too clean and the best description of this I have heard is from a Japanese 3D animator, "the computer animation will never be as perfect as hand drawn", kinda sums it up really, but its a trade off, time, money and texture animation for not hand drawn. I miss the pencil though.

Incidentally this entire scene was made in digitally, from storyboard image all the way through. Oh and in 2 different countries - (another reason for the digital process).

The Andy & Derek Show

It's been a good couple of weeks, so for a little celebration, we're all off for some Friday drinks. But before we go here's a quick promo image from a show we're developing at the moment. It's gone through a few name changes but I think this one might just stay for now. We'll have more images up very soon of the main characters of Andy & Derek. Also, Goodbye & Au revoir to Tom Caulfield who is off to Paris for the next while ... Paris is in France for those who don't know ..... Anyway hope you have a great time and we'll see you soon TC. 

Wulfie Trailer Update - 30th Jan 08

So here is a Wulfie Trailer updated animatic, it is still really, really rough but most of the animation has been keyed out, if not inbetweened in some places, and some of the backgrounds have been sketched in (some in b&w), but we still have the temp audio and even have the people playing the characters changing throughout the animation. 

The animators have done a great job, and over the next couple of months we will be doing the Anime Studio pass.  Incidentally the backgrounds were sketched in Art Rage 2.5, an excellent programme costing approx. $25, a steal i think for what you can do.

Enjoy and hope to post another update in the coming weeks as we are recording the final audio next Tuesday. Back to phrases such as "can we turn the cuteness up a notch or two" happy days indeed. 

:)

Wulfie Work has started

I haven't posted in a while, but I have my reasons, Christmas and New Years came and went but now animation has started on Wulfie and it has been all consuming. We have Tom C (his blog), Alfredo (his blog) and Alessandra (her blog) all doing great work keying out the animation in Flash and they have been motoring through the scenes. 

We kinda did it a little wonky though, we have been auditioning voices over the last week and a some composers for the music. It was great, talking about the show and the characters, motivations and relationships between them all and now we have to go thorough all the recordings and cast the roles, it is a tough decision I have to say. And I will hold my hand up to some awful directing sayings when dealing with the actors, terrible stuff such as "turn the cuteness up a notch or too", I cringe at thinking about it.

This seems to be the wordiest posting so far but one last thing, we have had 3 birthdays so far in a matter of 2 weeks of production of the trailer. Alfredo, Michael and myself all became that one year older. And friend of the family, Tomm M of Brendan also added another notch on the belt of time.

So in commemoration, and to post some artwork here is an image TC did for Alfredo.

Brendan Animation - Waves

Over the last few months I've been working on Brendan and the Secret of Kells with the guys at The Cartoon Saloon and here is some animation from the big storm sequence at the beginning of the film.  The Wave animation, which I was responsible for was produced in Toon Boom and Anime Studio. 

Other animators involved in the scenes are Barry Reynolds, who did the character animation, cleanup in the Kecskemét film, Hungary and Olivia Honan did the fire and smoke animation (in Flash) as Iona burns.

Wulfie Animation Test

We wanted to do a little animation test for wulfie, to see if we could get the water colour colouring to work and I have posted it below. A fairly successful job I think, although it still has some issues that I feel can be solved on the next test.

For anybody interested, the Pencil animation was done by Tom C, in a programme called Pencil and on the cintiq. Then the movie was taken into Anime Studio and using the pencil animation as the basis re was reanimated and refined and finally the texture applied, oh and the texture was made in Painter Essentials.

Anyway thats how we did it, on to the next test and a little harder animation i think.

Wulfie Cleaned Images

Below are some images from the Wulfie series we have in-development. Tom C has done a great job working from Aurelie's concept sketches. Talented young people the lot of them. And for anyone interested all the sketches were drawn directly into the computer, but Tom still misses the paper :(

It is Flash based so just click on the image to cycle through them.

Wulfie Trailer

Wulfie Trailer 22.11.07

This is the animatic version of the Wulfie trailer with temp music and our own great voice acting, well done to Tom C for the artwork which was all produced in the computer using our cintiq and Painter programme.  Roll on the paperless workflow.

The Saw Doctors & Telethon 07

We recently finished of a promotional video for the Galway based band The Saw Doctors and the re-releasing of the song "I Useta Lover". Its been 17 years since the original release and there is one easy way to make you feel old. Anyway we based our 30sec promo on our take on the iPod adverts and you can find it on YouTube here...

Enjoy :)

We go on to YouTube

We have gone on to YouTube and have uploaded a couple of videos from old adverts we did for both the Galway Film Fleadh and Project '06. We hope you enjoy and we plan to put more up in the near future.

Below is the video of the 2006 advert we did in Flash and After Effects for the Galway Film Fleadh.

and there is also the link to the Project '06 Advert
Project '06 on YouTube