Saturday, April 01, 2006

back from the big smoke


Well, it was a day of two halves as the man said .
In the morning we realised how urgent it is to get all the contracts and finance stuff
signed off on asap.
The Irish finance is very complicated to organise , especially the Section 481 and so on, and the fact that its a co-production means we are totally reliant on our partners in France and Belgium getting all their paperwork together too.
So they in turn are relying on their financiers, broadcasters , all that to give it priority and so its all a bit stressful and seems to drag on and on.
However we are nearly there, and we have good men on the case, James Flynn of Octagon Films is exec producing, James Hickey our lawyer. And of course Paul "Hollywood" Young here in Cartoon Saloon the producer. Anyway I hope all parties will pull together and we'll put the paperwork to bed in the next week or two.

On a lighter note , the meeting with Mick Lally went a treat. He's totally class . He just sounded completely right, hit the right tone and everthing immediately.
It was so exciting. Nora and Paul were greatly impressed too.

Nora acted Brendans part with Mick on seq32 and it was really exciting to hear. We recorded some dialogue and its magic to hear the lines with so much character .

Makes 'em sound really believable too. Nora said at one point (when I went out to the jacks or something) that she said to Mick that Brother Aidan is a bit of fool - and Mick corrected her - "No , he just takes his wisdom lightly" so that was class.

He's seems really into the role .
He really liked the script.

I was so embarrassed by all the spelling mistakes that I noticed on the train re-reading it. I can't believe how many slipped thru'!

So I made a little mock up with a picture I nabbed from www.elmamurray.com
(hey its good to say where you find stuff with this blogging business I reckon!) and a drawing of Aidan.
He might be able to do the recording in May, schedule allowing , hes in a play at the moment.
So that'll be great.

It'd be great to get a table read with him and Brendan Gleeson.

I did a little mock up of him as Abbot Cellach too. Just nabbed that pic from a google image search.
Like the beard on him in that, makes him look a bit more like the character!
Paul has gotten used to directing actors a bit in doing the Skunk-Fu recording sessions
and he was really a great help on that score.

Actually in the original version of this project, which was basically a totally different film, different story and so on, we had imagined Brendan Gleeson as the main character and we based the character design on him.
But that characters not even in this version of the film .
All the other actors who tried out for other parts were great too, really cool to hear the lines run thru' by pros.
But I'll not say too much as we are gonna audition a fair few people for those roles and we have'nt really decided on them yet.

One of the actors at the auditions was saying about how it kind of irks him that , y'know Shrek and all put these BIG NAMEs besides the characters and it takes him out of the film. Thats a good point, and he also said a neat thing too - when you consider that the BIG NAMEs probably only spent a week or two recording the dialogue and then the animators spend YEARs on the rest of the performance. But sure maybe thats just the nature of the techinque.

here, maybe I should leave the rants to better men than me, its not all that important in the greater scheme of things of course.

This post has gotten looooong.

I'll do a seperate one about the clean-up cos thats a whole other story...!

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