Brendan O'Reilly

The other night I met up with Ross Stewart for a quiet one to conspire on our plans for a Kilkenny Branch of the Vegetarian Society (you heard it here first folks!) and who should walk in to Cleeres pub but David O'Reilly.
It was great to see him after so many years.
These days David is one of the most talented animation directors going -

http://www.davidoreilly.com/

But back in the days of yore when we had our studios in Young Irish Filmmakers, David spent a lot of time hanging out with us. He was but a teenager back then but already very good at the old drawing.
We chatted a bit about all his hours scanning and inking and painting and even doing a bit of inbetweening and stuff on the original "Rebel" trailer from 2000 .
In that incarnation the Brendan character was based on David as you can see from the modelsheets above by Barry Reynolds. Barry also animated a scene of "David-Brendan" with Pangur Ban which is in the "Rebel" promo video too.

When the film was rewritten in 2003 we started redesigning everything to suit the new story and approach and I post an early concept of this new approach by Ross Stewart above, maybe the last concept we did with the old Brendan design in mind before he got reworked into the final version .

Anyway poor David never got credit for all that nasty scanning, inking and painting so I hope this post sorts that out!