This showreel or showcase, as I’m calling of it, consists of
animation work I created during by time working for Brown Bag Films and Monster
Entertainment between 2005 and 2012. This is only a highlights reel of the TV
series, commercials and short films I worked on during that time but it does
give a healthy overview of the type of work done during that period.
I've been meaning to put this together for a very long time
but the process of finding and editing even a fraction of the work was often
daunting. For example, the TV series ‘I’m a Creepy Crawly’ which I designed and
directed for Monster Entertainment in 2012 consists of 52 individual episodes
which meant going through and editing material from a stack of DVDs.
Similarly, the preschool TV series ‘Wobblyland’ is represented here as an edit of the opening titles, which I animated along with animation director Matthew Darragh. In reality, I was a lead animator on the series and contributed to 26 episodes over the course of 9 months, yet here it gets a minuscule 6 seconds of screen time. When you only have 6 seconds to showcase 9 months work, it’s best in my opinion to pick a segment that is rich and complex, so thankfully, I could use the title sequence for that purpose.
The showreel is broken down into 5 sections - Television Animation, Commercial Animation, Production Process, Short film Animation and finally Animation Direction. I could write a chapter on each section explaining the roles, workflow, production experience and so on but i’ll try and be brief and outline what I actually did in each section.
Television Animation - The first section is television animation starting with the pilot for ‘I’m a Dino’. I storyboarded, art directed and animated this episode myself after completing the first session of ‘I’m an Animal’. The pilot eventually went into production many years later with a Canadian company but this was my first opportunity to really design something for animation.
The resulting pilot is still available on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGdlZEIuH0M - and has racked up over a million views.
Also in the Television Animation section is a selection of shots from the ‘I’m an Animal’ series. As animators on this show, we created all the character, background and animation assets, essentially building the entire episode in Flash ourselves. It was a very simple but effective pipeline with each episode taking about 2 - 3 weeks to complete.
Next, we have Cat Little’s ‘Wobblyland’ for Brown Bag Films and Nick Jr. As I mentioned above, I was a lead animator on the series and worked on the production for about 9 months. It was one of the first shows made in Toon Boom’s Harmony software. Amidst the ‘I’m a’ series and ‘Wobblyland’ is the TV special for ‘Crap Rap - Tidy Towns and Tangerines’, directed by Nicky Phelan. Myself and Erica Lack shared Animation Director duties on the ‘Crap Rap’ special, which again was completed using Toon Boom Harmony. Nicky later went on to receive an Oscar nomination for Granny O’Grimm’s Sleepy Beauty. I also had the privilege of being 2D Lead Animator on the short, so that’s the Short Film section covered.
Commercial Animation - This section is for, you guest it, commercials or TV advertisements. I worked on a lot of ads with Nicky Phelan or Bronagh O'Hanlon directing. Bronagh went on to design the characters for Doc McStuffins which won a Peabody Award last week. God, the more I look at the success these two had, the more I regret leaving Brown Bag... Anyway, I learnt a great deal from these two very talented people and we tried a lot of different styles as you can see in this section. I was the animator on all these ads and also helped with the look development and production processes.
Production Processes - These are commercials/ads that I either animated some of or managed the production and look development for. All these ads were animated traditionally on paper and then brought into Harmony for Ink and Paint along with digital processing.
For example, my job on the UTV/Progressive campaign was to come up with the colouring process to create a visual look that matched Oliver Jeffers (Lost and Found) illustrations. We would start with a traditional animation test, then come up with a colouring process to match the style needed, which was then used to pitch for the job. Most of these processes we came up with were one offs as they could be very labour intensive such as hand drawing shadows that had a painted look.
Short Film Section - As mentioned earlier, I had a the privilege of being 2D lead animator on Granny O’Grimms Sleeping Beauty. Most of the work I did actually consisted of rough animation, drawn using a Wacom Tablet into Flash. The final animation was then completed using the character rigs by Eoghan Dalton and Dave Chapman. Eoghan went on to be a co-founder of Studio Powwow and Dave is Lead Art Director for HMH.
Animation Direction - Finally we have Animation Direction and a brief highlights section for the TV series ‘I’m a Creepy Crawly’ for Monster Entertainment. Creepy Crawly is part of the same franchise as ‘I’m an Animal’ and ‘I’m a Dinosaur’ so it is in some way fitting that I went onto direct the franchise considering I had animated a bunch of the first series. I also got to design all the characters in the series. That’s about 104 characters if we go on the assumption that each episode had a least two brand new characters. I learnt how to design fast on that show. Again, we’re talking about a whole series ( in fact 2 series, given the number of episodes) that I can only give 30 seconds to but actually took an entire year on and off to complete from pilots through to final episode.
Other work completed during and after this period from 2005 - 2012 includes lots of development work on shows like Gaspard and Lisa and Bing Bunny when they were considered for 2D animation. Myself and Eoghan Dalton animated a lot of 2D fish for the hit series ‘Octonauts’ but fish swim cycles are not exactly exciting showreel material. I’m sure there are a bunch of things I’m forgetting to include or talk about but it’s been nice to have to chance to look back at some of this work again and put together this little reel.
Similarly, the preschool TV series ‘Wobblyland’ is represented here as an edit of the opening titles, which I animated along with animation director Matthew Darragh. In reality, I was a lead animator on the series and contributed to 26 episodes over the course of 9 months, yet here it gets a minuscule 6 seconds of screen time. When you only have 6 seconds to showcase 9 months work, it’s best in my opinion to pick a segment that is rich and complex, so thankfully, I could use the title sequence for that purpose.
The showreel is broken down into 5 sections - Television Animation, Commercial Animation, Production Process, Short film Animation and finally Animation Direction. I could write a chapter on each section explaining the roles, workflow, production experience and so on but i’ll try and be brief and outline what I actually did in each section.
Television Animation - The first section is television animation starting with the pilot for ‘I’m a Dino’. I storyboarded, art directed and animated this episode myself after completing the first session of ‘I’m an Animal’. The pilot eventually went into production many years later with a Canadian company but this was my first opportunity to really design something for animation.
The resulting pilot is still available on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGdlZEIuH0M - and has racked up over a million views.
Also in the Television Animation section is a selection of shots from the ‘I’m an Animal’ series. As animators on this show, we created all the character, background and animation assets, essentially building the entire episode in Flash ourselves. It was a very simple but effective pipeline with each episode taking about 2 - 3 weeks to complete.
Next, we have Cat Little’s ‘Wobblyland’ for Brown Bag Films and Nick Jr. As I mentioned above, I was a lead animator on the series and worked on the production for about 9 months. It was one of the first shows made in Toon Boom’s Harmony software. Amidst the ‘I’m a’ series and ‘Wobblyland’ is the TV special for ‘Crap Rap - Tidy Towns and Tangerines’, directed by Nicky Phelan. Myself and Erica Lack shared Animation Director duties on the ‘Crap Rap’ special, which again was completed using Toon Boom Harmony. Nicky later went on to receive an Oscar nomination for Granny O’Grimm’s Sleepy Beauty. I also had the privilege of being 2D Lead Animator on the short, so that’s the Short Film section covered.
Commercial Animation - This section is for, you guest it, commercials or TV advertisements. I worked on a lot of ads with Nicky Phelan or Bronagh O'Hanlon directing. Bronagh went on to design the characters for Doc McStuffins which won a Peabody Award last week. God, the more I look at the success these two had, the more I regret leaving Brown Bag... Anyway, I learnt a great deal from these two very talented people and we tried a lot of different styles as you can see in this section. I was the animator on all these ads and also helped with the look development and production processes.
Production Processes - These are commercials/ads that I either animated some of or managed the production and look development for. All these ads were animated traditionally on paper and then brought into Harmony for Ink and Paint along with digital processing.
For example, my job on the UTV/Progressive campaign was to come up with the colouring process to create a visual look that matched Oliver Jeffers (Lost and Found) illustrations. We would start with a traditional animation test, then come up with a colouring process to match the style needed, which was then used to pitch for the job. Most of these processes we came up with were one offs as they could be very labour intensive such as hand drawing shadows that had a painted look.
Short Film Section - As mentioned earlier, I had a the privilege of being 2D lead animator on Granny O’Grimms Sleeping Beauty. Most of the work I did actually consisted of rough animation, drawn using a Wacom Tablet into Flash. The final animation was then completed using the character rigs by Eoghan Dalton and Dave Chapman. Eoghan went on to be a co-founder of Studio Powwow and Dave is Lead Art Director for HMH.
Animation Direction - Finally we have Animation Direction and a brief highlights section for the TV series ‘I’m a Creepy Crawly’ for Monster Entertainment. Creepy Crawly is part of the same franchise as ‘I’m an Animal’ and ‘I’m a Dinosaur’ so it is in some way fitting that I went onto direct the franchise considering I had animated a bunch of the first series. I also got to design all the characters in the series. That’s about 104 characters if we go on the assumption that each episode had a least two brand new characters. I learnt how to design fast on that show. Again, we’re talking about a whole series ( in fact 2 series, given the number of episodes) that I can only give 30 seconds to but actually took an entire year on and off to complete from pilots through to final episode.
Other work completed during and after this period from 2005 - 2012 includes lots of development work on shows like Gaspard and Lisa and Bing Bunny when they were considered for 2D animation. Myself and Eoghan Dalton animated a lot of 2D fish for the hit series ‘Octonauts’ but fish swim cycles are not exactly exciting showreel material. I’m sure there are a bunch of things I’m forgetting to include or talk about but it’s been nice to have to chance to look back at some of this work again and put together this little reel.
