back home for a bit

So came back home to Kilkenny last Thursday night/Friday morning.
We had some fantastic news on Thursday , a new arrival and our first (as far as I know anyway) production baby arrived.
Nora had a lovely little baby boy called Oliver. I was glad to be able to get back in time to meet him.
Fine young fella he is too.
Mammy and Baby doing great and proud as punch Dad Michael (voice of adult Brendan) enjoyed a celebratory cigar with me last night .
Happy Days.


In less exciting news- The screening in Paris was pretty good. The film stock kinda punched up the colours a bit and made it all illuminated and stuff.
The image is 1.66 and so a little bit gets cut off on the 1.85 screens...but I think the compositiosn just look better 1.66.
Didier Brunner the French executive producer was there and he was pretty happy with the final look of the scenes we tested , so I was glad about that. He has good taste , I think , and all the rest of us are kinda sick looking at it so we had no real perspective.

The main frustration for everyone now though is the constant pressure of being so overschedule.
Its hard to get a bead on just when we can finish with all the different factors...getting the last of the clean up scanned, sent to DG , painted, sent to Spirit, getting it composited, fixing whatever needs to be fixed .
In fact , some of the most difficult scenes to be composited have not even started yet.

These ones, the Crom Cruach sequence with a lot of Cg and the Attack on Kells by the Vikings are kinda monsters. They have so many elements , 3d, Flash, effects and of course traditional 2d characters. We were scheduled to work on them this week but it was decided to wait until all the elements for every scene are completed before going for it. I guess this is wise, but its also a pity as we wont have any of these very spectacular scenes in the trailer thats being cut for Cartoon Movie.

Some debate has arrisen about the title too...maybe its not just quite settled yet.
I dunno. The French title might still be "Brendan - The Secret of Kells".
Theres just SO many "secret" titles out there, sigh.

I went to see an awesome movie in Angouleme - "Peur du Noir" - such an excellent film, I just couldnt believe it got made. Thank God for the French I say. Good taste in cartoons .
I dont think such exciting, ambitious and experimental animation ever really gets a chance in the English speaking world. Just being in Angouleme or Brussels where comics and animation are considered so highly is inspiring.
I wonder how it would feel to grow up as a comic book fan in a town with a statue to Herge in the centre and murals by cartoonists everywhere.
The Comic book museum is really impressive and its just a testament to how valued the medium is there.
sigh.

more pictures and hopefully the trailer very soon...I promise!

T

Angouleme

Well, I have been back in the very cool town of Angouleme for the past two weeks working on the compositing. Just before that was in Liege at Digital Graphics working with Serge Ume on the EFX. Some very cool stuff on the mist...we got it looking like celtic knotwork, arranged in bands like Book of Kells borders. It looks nice but its a lot of compositional work at compositing.
Damien here in Spirit has become "Mr.Mist" and is doing some lovely work with the efx Serge and Eric made.

Anyway just sloooooooowly plodding along to a finish hopefully we will start to go faster soon...better run taxi waiting to go to Paris to see a film test on the big screen...GULP!