Irn-Bru
I’ve recently finished my most fun job for a long time – worknig at Sherbet, directing the animation on this ad for Irn Bru.
The animation was done by first working traditionally with pencil, then tracing those drawings into Flash to duplicate the traditional brush-on-cel look. (Simply scanning the drawings into a trace-and-paint program would have given a more modern look than we wanted.)
For the animation, we needed people who were specialists in this style and were lucky to get Teddy Hall, a Disney veteran who worked on Hercules, Peter Dodd, who recently animated much of Sylvain Chomet’s new feature “The Illusionist”, and the tireless Paul Stone, who seems to have worked on almost every London-produced traditional production of the last twenty years. Denise Dean had her work cut out as cleanup artist but somehow managed to keep up with these three.
The Flash team of Malcolm Mole, David Bell and Martin Oliver achieved a nice line quality on a challenging job from day one, and the After-Effects guys, Alex Robinson and Tony Comley wrapped it all up with impressive skill.
Since everyone made the directing role so easy, I found time to keep my hand in on the animation – I did the dancing meat at the end, and helped out with the Flash work.
Sherbet was a great place to work – the regular staff there -Adam, Ben and Sarah (get well soon!) were incredibly helpful and made my first directing job there a real pleasure -and thanks again to producer Jonathan Bairstow for offering me the job in the first place!
