Saturday, February 14, 2009

where its due...

I noticed in that interview posted below that one very important member of the design team was not mentioned.
This was an unintentional omission.
I've posted before about Barry Reynolds' work finalising the main character designs and designing all the other characters in the film. His sense of design unified the characters and was very important to the final look of the film.
He was involved in the initial visual devlopment of "Rebel" back in 2000 and I asked him to come back and join the team in 2005 to help pull all the development work I'd done with Ross Stewart together into the final designs.
He also did most of the designs for the characters that were added during storyboards and the final designs for all the secondary characters.
The only exception being that Jean Baptiste Van Demme made the Viking designs and model sheets .
However , it was mainly Barrys work on the model packs we used in all the countries involved in the production.
Barry was also the one responsible for checking that all the layout posing was on model and he did a huge amount of the layout posing on the film.
It was great to have someone with such a natural flair for design to pull everything together.

But I suppose I can never give enough credit to ALL the artists who poured their talent and energy into this production.
Like all animated features this film is the product of a lot of peoples talent and energy.
We have a credit list of about 200 people on this film and I am indebted to everyone of them for the commitment and hard work they have poured into this production.

I was the overall Director and worked on this project in its various forms for most of my twenties, and its a source of great pride that the initial designs and visual development we began in Ballyfermot college in 1999 evolved , thanks to all the crew who contributed over the years into something so much greater than I could ever have achieved alone.

It would be great to publish an "art of" book to showcase all the beautiful artwork and artifacts created by this talented team over the years.
If only we could find a willing publisher......;)

1 comment:

  1. Saw the movie today on the last day of the Berlin film festival and was entranced!
    And I was wondering if an "Art of..." book was in the planning. With Buena Vista distributing it, maybe someone at Disney publishing could be talked into developing that idea?

    ReplyDelete