Animation: Michael Cunningham meets the Dublin animators who played a key role in The King and I
A back alley, a stone's throw from O'Connell Street in Dublin's inner city. It's the smell of fresh paint, sawdust and skip junk, and the sound of courier bikes on wet cobblestones. Find the right buzzer, among the long list of familiar-sounding film and TV firms and theatre crews, and you're into a foyer with two leather chairs. Perched over them like cranes are. . . well, they really are a pair of big old-fashioned hairdressing salon hairdryers.
Upstairs and through a warren of whitewashed concrete and fresh faces, it's all swipecards and security doors until you finally reach the HQ of Brown Bag Films. The kind of place where hand-drawn animation frames are pinned to large noticeboards, beside doors which are mutating into montages of Polaroid snaps, with even some of the screensavers looking like they're still in production.
Brown Bag might ring a bell if you've seen The End or @last tv on Network 2. Or their children's animation Wolves, Witches and Giants. Or maybe their commercial for Kola noodles. And then there's The King and I - the new Warner Bros full-length animation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical which has just opened in Dublin. It has Martin Vidnovic doing the voice of Yul Brynner, oops, the King, and Miranda Richardson as Anna (with her songs sung by Christiane Noll).
More of that anon, but lets wind the tape back by five years. Darragh O'Connell and Cathal Gaffney met while at Senior College Ballyfermot. "Cathal was a year ahead of me. We never even finished college," Darragh explains. "The first big break was for The End - a pisstake of Peig, basically. We'd been working on it for a year, as a much longer piece, and RTE said they liked the idea but not the format. So we turned it into seven five-minute episodes.
"After Peig we had a team of people able to do TV animation. Then we did a lot of contract work, a lot of it was based abroad, everything from Germany to Canada - we've just finished a commercial for the Lebanon. 2-D is what we excel at, but we do a bit of everything. Our starting point is that we get into character animation."
From three people they grew to 10 core people plus freelances, and went increasingly digital. "Peig was all cel painting by hand. Changing everything all the way through can be incredibly costly. When we went digital you could not only do quick changes and colour things in much more quickly, but see many more possibilities."
They began their involvement with The King and I two years ago, and Brown Bag ended up as the European production hub for the Warner Bros project.
"Basically we acted as the co-ordinators, gathering all the artwork in Dublin, scanning it and using the same system they were using in L.A.," says Darragh O'Connell. "Initially, we were only supposed to do a small amount but it grew and grew. The reason they wanted us to do it was basically that we had the right technology. Our role was quite technical and involved a lot of administration. Our artistic involvement was more in the camera moves. We'd get the flat artwork and scan it in and the director would call for a particular camera move to get a depth into the scene, then we'd email it to L.A."
Being online means animation studios can be anywhere, and rushes are instant. It means digital files instead of physical drawings. And with ISDN lines and modems instead of couriers, it means no question of things getting lost, or major delays in order to tweak a drawing here or there.
They use a system called Animo. "It's the main one in the industry - Disney and Warners use it," he says. "It does everything from scanning in to paint and composite, it can handle 300 drawings no problem, and you can even render up to IMAX if you want. It was around £30,000 when we first started with it, but now it's down to about £12,000 for a full system." As for the future of Ireland's animation industry, it is much stronger since a half decade ago, when the emphasis tended to be on large multinationals until the collapse of the Sullivan Bluth studios.
"With Bluth, the product wasn't even being kept here," O'Connell says. And in Bluth, people were so specifically trained - they couldn't work in a studio environment, where you have to do a bit of everything. The recent IBEC report was way off the mark in terms of the size of the industry today. Today there are a lot of Irish-owned companies, which is a good thing, and it's much more product-driven."
Brown Bag is currently working on a pilot for a TV series called 24 Hours in Monstropolis, about two very different twins. Then there's The Last Elk - "We have a lot of hopes for it, we're entering it into a lot of festivals." It's six minutes long, and was a year in the making. A reminder that, for all those computers and ISDN lines, animation is still a labour-intensive and expensive art.
Michael Cunningham (mick@volta.net) is MD of the Internet development company Volta
Animation Links
Animation links www.thekingandi.com . . . Official site for the movie
www.iftn.ie . . . Ireland Film & Television Net, which has grown to become the first stop about Irish film production
www.animationartgallery.com . . . An interesting source for collectors of original production animation cels and drawings as well as the source for accurate information on collecting animation art
www.animo.com . . . Cambridge Animation Systems, the people behind the Animo system