Darragh O’Connell has been blogging all through the production of his new short film, ‘23 Degrees 5 Minutes’, and now we can finally show you the teaser trailer!
‘23 Degrees 5 Minutes’ is Brown Bag’s first short film since Nicky Phelan’s ‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’, which earned Nicky and Darragh an Oscar nomination.
In the short film, an old explorer close to freezing in the Arctic re-lives the events that brought him there in the first place. He recalls his student days at Trinity College in Dublin when he studied under the enigmatic Professor Orit, the professor who was driven to madness by his obsessive pursuit of the unified theory.
Convinced that the answer somehow lay in the relationship between the numbers two, three and five, Professor Orit’s obsession started the journey which has led his former student to the top of the world.
Featuring the voice talents of John Hurt and Stuart Townsend, and produced by Colm Tyrrell, the film was scripted by Darragh O’Connell based on a short story by Austin Kenny. The film is being made with the support of the Frameworks short film scheme and will premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh this summer
Our Octonauts blog posts continue to receive comments every day from parents of Octonauts fans (and sometimes the kids themselves!), desperate for toys, DVDs and other goodies. We don’t have a DVD release date yet but promise we will let you know as soon as we hear. As for the official toys, stand by for the amazing Octonauts toy range coming this August from Fisher Price. We can’t wait to get our hands on an Octopod!
In the meantime; loads of mums, dads, grandparents, aunties and kids have been making their own Octonauts toys, costumes, art, cakes and goodies. We’ve been blown away by the incredible creativity shown by these talented fans. It’s been fantastic to read all about the Octonauts-themed birthday parties and homemade presents. A few Octo-fans have even transformed their bedrooms into underwater worlds!
Here are some of the great home-made Octo-goodies that have been shared on Octonauts creators Meomi’s Octonauts Facebook and the Octonauts TV Facebook. We hope they inspire you to create your own cool toys while waiting for the official ones.
Norton Virgien, director of Rugrats and Duckman, and currently directing Disney’s ‘Doc McStuffins’ here at Brown Bag, will be speaking at Pegbar’s animation event this Friday 15 April.
Pegbar is an animation networking group based in Dublin. Friday’s event takes place at the Science Gallery.
Pegbar & the Science Gallery will be hosting a series of short talks, giving an insight into the creativity and technology behind the animation that we see on our screens today. Our guest speakers will include, Norton Virgien (Director of Rugrats and Duckman), Jason Tammemägi (Director of Fluffy Gardens and Ballybraddan) and renowned multimedia artist Fergal Brennan. After our series of talks, ticketholders can reside to the Trinity Inn for a few drinks, animations on screen and a bit of social networking.
Watch Pegbar all this week on Twitter and Facebookwhere we will be having an internet giveaway, & revealing the spot prizes we will have available on the night!
Tickets are €6 and entry is at 5:45. Grab some tapas downstairs in the cafe from 5:30 beforehand if you’re hungry!
Thanks for all your comments on last week’s posts. Really appreciate them!
This week I wanted to talk a bit about the backgrounds for ‘Origin’.
The film is a progression of the man’s attitude towards his environment and situation, and how that changes both physically and mentally. To help show this we plotted out how the colour would progress through a colour script. A colour script is a simple storyboard of the colour palette of the film and how it changes from shot to shot. The colour script informed the background painting and decisions on what colour and tones should be used for each sequence. I feel it is important that the mood of the background is aligned to the man’s thought process.
This image shows the 6 paintings from the first sequence of the film. At this point our hero’s mind set is supposed to be closed, frustrated and uninspired:
The Cartoon Movie took place on 2nd March in Lyon in France. For the first time Brown Bag Films attended and pitched our first animated feature film, NIGHTGLIDER.
Nightglider
I will leave it to another blog to give more information on Nightglider but for now, here’s the pitch: Nightglider is about a squirrel who thinks he’s a superhero after discovering that he can fly. When his comic antics bring the wrath of owls down upon him & his misfit friends, he learns that real heroes finish what they start. (more…)
Yesterday wasn’t your average Monday for Granny O’Grimm director Nicky Phelan. It’s not every day you get an invite to the White House from ‘The President and Mrs Obama’!
Nicky initially thought it was a joke when a woman at the American Embassy rang Brown Bag Films to give him a heads-up that an invite was on its way. But on Monday he received the following request to join the Obamas for the annual St Patrick’s Day reception in Washington on March 17th.
I’m sure Nicky will report back on whether Barack Obama is an animation fan!
Thanks for your comments on the last ‘making of’ post for Origin. Here’s a look at how we’ve moved ahead with characters and locations.
Once we had finished the 2D character concepts and were happy with the overall look and feeling, it was time to get those concepts into a structured form.
These images, from character designer Barry O’Donoghue, are the first model sheet designs of the character:
click on all images to enlarge
Using 2D model and gesture sheets is a great way to work out your characters’ head size, leg size, facial expressions etc before moving ahead into 3D. It’s important to troubleshoot these issues early on so the 3D artist doesn’t end up pushing and pulling in a 3D program which is a lot more time consuming then Photoshop or using a pencil.
I have also included the 3D models which were built by Lead 3D Artist Donnchadh Murphy once the model sheets were approved for 3D. (more…)
Lighting & rendering has become by far the trickiest part of the process so far! The fact we are using Renderman means we are working at a technical level way beyond anything we used in the past.
Hopefully the results will be worth it & here’s a look at some of the renders that we have produced so far:
Back in May I received word that I had been funded by the Irish Film Board to direct ‘Origin’, a concept of mine which I had submitted to their Short Shorts programme last March. Their theme this year is ‘Ireland I Love You’. Sean Smith at Souljacker is producing ’Origin’, but of course I have been drawing on the creativity and technical advice from all the artists and directors here in Brown Bag’s studio.
Brown Bag have also agreed that the project can use the production character pipeline which we have been developing here for some time, so that is a huge bonus to the project.
I thought I’d keep the blog up to date with some ‘Making Of’ posts tracking the progress of production. To start, here’s some info on the story and concept of ‘Origin’, and some concept artwork. (more…)
I thought it would be good to bring you up to date with how the looks of the ‘23 Degrees..’ characters are going.
We had signed off on the Professor Orit model, which is the grey scale model below:
signed off Professor Orit model
So the lads started doing some initial hair tests. Hair is a really tricky thing to get right & as you can see from some of these early tests (on a previous, unfinished model), Professor Orit started to look more like Jack Black.
