Cardiff’s leading animation company will rely on a cavegirl heroine and her pet pterodactyl to woo investors when they pitch their latest project in the hothouse atmosphere of the Cartoon Forum European marketing event in France this September.
Calon is submitting Ig, a planned 26 x 10-minute pre-school stop- motion series, which contains some po-faced advice from its creator Andrew Offiler. Appropriate, really, given the venue, Pau (pronounced Po) near the Pyrenees, and his planned warning in the series that potty- training tots should be careful not to sit on volcanoes. They should also, he says, be wary of sleeping with duvets which growl and turn into sabre-toothed tigers.
Ig is the little girl with the Stone Age family of pets and a dinosaur, Big Daddy, as formidable patriarch. Other characters include Monkey Boy, half chimp half boy, and Triple Tog, the tiger doubling as a duvet.
The series would boast designs by Bristol-based Tim Farrington, a set creator on Aardman’s box office hit feature Chicken Run and art director on Calon’s current project Hana’s Helpline.
The Cardiff bay outfit hopes to attract cash for Ig from S4C and Channel Five, says company director and WAG chair Robin Lyons.
Offiler thinks Ig, for all its weirder conceptions and happy conceits, basically fits characters snugly into the ‘family group’ beloved of TV programmers. “We have the parent figure and the younger brother type - Monkey Boy”, he says. The series promises distant echoes of Calon’s S4C favourite Sali Mali with its little girl and pet jackdaw.
Supposedly set in the Stone Age Ig, if it attracts the necessary finance to go ahead, will feature unashamedly anachronistic devices. There will be a surreal element with a sun like a yo-yo, for instance, clouds supported by strings, “like children's mobiles” and an entire new concept – lava surfing!.
The vocabulary in the series will be limited to around 50 words, but Ig will introduce children to some new words and phrases, Offiler promises.
One notion is that there should be potted phrases in the programme regularly repeated “don’t like” and “stop it” , for instance, and familiar to parents and kids alike..
Calon won’t be complacent at Cartoon Forum. In its previous guise - Siriol - it enjoyed more successes than any other in Wales in achieving finance to press ahead with projects pitched. Yet competition is so intense that only one third of the company’s ideas taken to Forum have been made – a mix of 3D (Hilltop Hospital and Hana’s Helpline) and 2D (Romuald the Reindeer, Tales of the Tooth Fairies and Billy the Cat).
Sand animator Gerald Conn plans to develop a half hour drama version of Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness after hearing a wireless recording of Orson Welles narrating the story in a CBS series 61 years ago.
Conn, managing director of Cardiff's Cinetig hopes to attract TV interest and investment and has made a one minute trailer using his specialist sand on glass techniques. He’s had a pilot trailer soundtrack recorded by Christian McKay who’s recently featured as the redoubtable Welles in the one-man stage drama Rosebud, written by Welshman Mark Jenkins, at the fashionable Kings Head venue in London.
“Ed Talfan and I had the idea of a series of Gothic novels and this was a subject I really wanted to make. I loved Conrad’s story and thought the sense of darkness in the tale would suit the back and white of sand animation.
“We’ve spoken to a Conrad scholar Richard Hand and Christopher Frayling, well- known expert and writer on horror films was an advisory consultant on this project and we certainly had positive responses from Chris Grace when he was animation executive at S4C and the BBC education department.
“We’re still hopeful we can get this project off the ground, but certainly Cinetig want to make Heart of Darkness.” Conrad’s novella has long attracted the interest of filmmakers. Welles himself planned to make it before his 1940 masterpiece Citizen Kane and of course the story’s the basis for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and proved an inspiration for German filmmaker Werner Herzog. ( a documentary on this maverick tortured director also bore the story’s title).
Conn loved Welles’s treatment of it in the series This is My Best – “He narrated as Conrad’s Marlow and added some wartime references and his sardonic wit and sense of melodrama added much to the story. Christian McKay wouldn’t just be imitating Welles, we’d seek to provide a flavour of his adaptation and the original story”.
Cinetig has had a heavy schedule of late and recently a company short Tan Yn Y Tanna (Fire in the Strings) a history of harp-playing and Romanies in Wales became the first lottery-backed Cinetig short to appear solo, or ‘stand alone’, on S4C.
Early in May Cinetig previewed Haiku Cwm Afan, a project the company’s just completed with two Afan valley schools Cwm Afan junior and Cymmer Afan comprehensive.
Directed by Conn and Chris Elliott, the film centres around Haiku Japanese poems and draws parallels between the rebirth of nature in trees and plants, a common theme of Haiku, and the rebirth of industry in south Wales with the establishment of Japanese factories. The film’s idea stemmed partly from the work of Welsh- born Japanese- based author CW Nicol in campaigning for the environment and helping in tree-planting schemes (see following story) .The twosome Miwsig provided the soundtrack.
Locations such as Abergwynfi, the mountain bike centre at Glyncorrwg and the viaduct at Pontrhydyfen (Richard Burton’s birthplace) all prompted images for a film backed by Groundwork of Bridgend, Neath and Port Talbot and Cywaith Cymru/ Artsworks Wales, with designs by Carlos Pinatti.
Cinetig has now embarked on three films for a £42,900 Heritage Lottery project based at the National History Museum, St Fagans. Each short will feature animation work from individual schools in different areas of Wales and will be shown in the revamped Gallery One to focus attention on outstanding artefacts and exhibits at St Fagans, as part of the Museum Wales 2007 Centenary project. Children at Pontnewydd primary have already visited St Fagans for inspiration and will help make a short about national traditions and folk customs ( including a Bardic chair made in Shanghai in its Eisteddfod imagery), another programme by Nayland junior, west Wales, centres on Family and Ninian Park primary focus on Beliefs. The trio of school shorts will combine in a longer film for the Gallery One re-opening in 2007, and each school will specialise in a creative area of production on the longer film – Nayland with music, Pontnewydd with a soundtrack of poetry and a trailer and Ninian Park with live- action filming. Cinetig and pupils in each school will work on animation and post- production for a week during September/October.
“We want to involve younger audiences and thought childrens animation work would help achieve this,’St Fagans education coordinator Nia Williams told WAG. “We want to use this gallery as a sort of laboratory to show how people create meanings and use symbolism.” The gallery will include a replica of a 14th century wall painting of St. Catherine - and the woollen black cats soldiers put in their pockets for good luck during World War One.
Being Bilingual, by Cinetig’s Jane Hubbard, may also be shown in the Gallery with the other three school films as another St Fagans attraction.
Cash cow for Villeneuve?
A book by a celebrated Welsh born childrens' novelist in Japan has inspired a current animator in Wales to break new creative ground.
Freelance Rick Villeneuve, former WAG committeeman and ex-Cartwn Cymru, has illustrated a childrens’ story by all round ‘Renaissance’ man CW Nicol, writer, karate expert and Arctic explorer. Nicol, now in his late 60s and Neath- born, was a feted guest at the then International Film Festival, Wales (later Cardiff Screen Festival) in 2001, and the two men forged a friendship[ then, thanks to Christian and Natsuyo Lewis- Searle of the Celt21 company.
Nicol was impressed by Villeneuve’s work animating sequences of the Mabinogi and the two maintained contact. The Canadian- born animator agreed to illustrate the book, of a mythical Celtic 6th century story, one of three tales by Nicol now reissued, in four books, by Tokyo- based educational publishers Labo.
The story, The Fairy Cow, is based around a daydreaming Celtic lad,Edwin, impoverished with his mother after his father dies but who persists in doing little save carving lovespoons. One day a green man appears with a fairy cow, traded to the boy in return for a love spoon. The youth promises to take care of it faithfully down the decades. The beast yields much milk, the family’s fortunes soar but when Edwin, now an old man, dies, his son threatens to butcher the cow. A lady of the lake appears (every good Celtic story has one) and in miffed retaliation, ensures the cow and an entire herd – long the family’s mealticket - return to the lake.
Villeneuve plumped to tell his story in wood through photo- realism, rather than rely on his usual 2D style - a decision prompted by the lovespoons element. “I used Photoshop for the first time, and digital photography and concentrated on physical elements of the story. I originally thought of using bone, but the lovespoon theme clinched it. The idea of a story told through wood certainly appealed to Mr Nicol with his passion for trees. I stripped the lovespoons down to create different images and also used other elements around the garden for the images and to create texture.
“I’m pleased with the outcome and so are the publishers, I gather. I’ve done 14 full page illustrations, each to appear opposite a page of text, and sent off another 30 odd character drawings for insertion.” The book should emerge this summer as a bilingual English and Japanese edition to coincide with the publisher’s 40th anniversary.
While in Wales five years ago Nicol played a prime role in an ambitious tree-planting programme at an Afan Argoed educational nature reserve near Neath. His childrens’ story inspired the Japanese animation feature film The Boy Who Saw The Wind, screened in Cardiff in 2001.
WAG members invited to Newport Animation Beanfeast.
Films by British Animation Award winner Leigh Hodgkinson will be the main attraction at a special Animation Day/ WAG public event on Saturday, May 27.
Best known as a solo freelancer for shorts such as Moo(n) and her latest prizewinner, Stalk, Hodgkinson has been making a one- minute film with Newport- based students as part of her one month Animator in Residence stint at the International Film School, Wales. It enables students to run almost the entire gamut of animation techniques with its emphasis on 2D, 3D collage, cut- out and stop-motion.
“The film we’re making, Flighty, is about butterfly speed-dating. I thought this was a good idea as butterflies only live two weeks, so they have to do their dating pretty quickly. The film combines the concepts of madness and beauty” , says Hodgkinson, born in Zimbabwe but brought up in Southampton. Post-production of Flighty will employ Flash, After Effects and Photoshop.
WAG members can sample her work and achievements at her 15-minute 4.15pm slot at the Animation Day in the town’s Riverside Arts Centre, near both bus and railway stations. Other attractions in a six- to- seven hour programme include the latest Animate! Touring Programme backed by the Arts Council and Channel Four (from 7pm to 8.15 and costing £3.50 a ticket, £2.50 concessions). All other entertainment, including student animation work and films from the Newport college’s MA, 2nd year and 3rd year courses, is free.
Hodgkinson, graduated from Hull University with a First in Graphic design in 1998 and from the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield in 2001.
Her shorts include Excess Baggage and Novelty – her British Animation Award winner at college, and Matryoshka for Sonimotion. She’s also freelanced for Pesky Animation and worked as freelance at Slinky Pictures. In 2001 she was accepted for the MOMI / Channel Four animator- in residence scheme and based at the Imax building and the upshot was her much praised film Moo(n). A fellow student on the MOMI scheme was Matthew Hood and both were involved in the 26- episode childrens series Charlie and Lola for Tiger Aspect, Hodgkinson as art designer, Hood as a director.
Hodgkinson has been delighted with the success of Stalk, a prizewinner at two festivals, a women's event at Creteil in France and a fest at Winterburg, Switzerland.
competition from live- action films.
“I’ve won certain awards in categories also including live- action films. I’m particularly pleased about that, as I like to think of myself as a filmmaker rather than an animator. At Newport I’ll also be doing workshops and well be examining all kinds of images and using ‘ found’ footage to illustrate ideas.”
Her website address is www.hoonpatrol.co.uk
Other Animation day events –1.30pm Student Speed-networking session
4pm Road Safety Films presented by Penny Thorpe from Capita. Riverside box office no. booking line is 01633-656-757
IFSW are in the throes of a hectic few weeks – with the degree show on May 26 at Caerleon campus and IFSW Finest Films show at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre on June 22. The International Film School and Glamorgan Centre for Art and Design Technology also features work in the Best of Accredited Courses screening at BAFTA, London, on June 26.
ends