Friday, January 15, 2010

Praise fromJohn Canemaker ! Wow!

“The film is one of the most beautifully designed ever, and a charming, refreshing approach to storytelling.” – John Canemaker

Some high praise indeed from something of an animation legend!

The films been gathering some great praise from the preview screenings in the States lately and Eric and Dave of Gkids have been passing the good word onto myself and Paul.

Seems a good moment to give some more shout outs to our design and story team -

One of our Bg supervisors Lily Bernard is back in the studio, working on some Bgs for our Santapprentise co-production with Alphanim , and she was responsible for lots of the beautiful prop designs too.

Also working on Santa is Adrien Mergeau another superstar Bg artist and supervisor who is heading to Sundance soon with his short film Old Fangs which we produced here in Saloon last year , and theres master sculptor Jean Baptiste Van Demme who is also painting Santa bgs , he was the man responsible for the very cool Viking designs .

Also working with us again is Todor Polson on the bgs for a commercial that Kells animation supervisor Fabian Erlinghauser is directing right now. Tod made the colour script very early on when we were just at the first stages of storyboarding .

Captain Sandwiche himself , the Kells Art director Ross Stewart is hanging out here a bit these days he recently directed and designed the very classy "Cailleach an Airgid" musical short for the "Anam an Amrain" series we made for TG4 this Christmas.

Not forgetting all our other design and story team mates of course-
Maestro Barry Reynolds who made the final character designs and model sheets , supervising all the character model-stuff for the layout posing and animation we did here, and of course the multi talented Remi Chaye who worked on the storyboards with Nora and I.
Screenwriter Fabrice Ziolkowski who majorly helped pull the whole story into its final form after years of development should be very proud too.
And then theres the layout team,animators, compositors,production people and musicians to thank too, well too many to mention .

With all the good will and kind reviews the film is generating from the likes of John Canemaker, Charles Solomon , Jerry Beck and numerous other famous animation authoritys I hope the whole crew all over the world feel its a reflection of all their hard work and dedication .





3 comments:

  1. I think everyone who was at the screening there on Tuesday would agree with Mr. Canemaker's description; initial impressions were overwhelmingly positive :)

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  2. Hey T, thanks for the mention! You didn't need to.. Well of course we're all happy with the films success and all the the good will that it's receiving. You'd have to be a mad man.. or woman!.. not to be.

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