Kilkenny Animated 2024
I will start this by saying that Kilkenny was a beautiful place to visit and was an incredible first introduction to animation festivals for me. It was an absolute honour to get to hear the history and thoughts of incredible animators such as Glen Keane, Joanna Quinn, John Musker, and Imogen Sutton, as well as the opportunity to tour Cartoon Saloon’s studio and ask questions directly to Ruchi Shah and Colm Dowling from Lighthouse Studio. This trip was so inspirational that I decided to dedicate a portion of my website solely to recounting any festivals or research trips I go on so that I can share what I have learnt with anyone who may find my writing.
I took time off work to travel from Spirit Bridge Studio in Coventry to the rural city of Kilkenny in South-East Ireland. I travelled with my good friend and coworker Nathan Hill, and the two of us spent Saturday, the 5th and early Sunday, the 6th of October, going to various tours and talks and indulging in life drawing while we waited between events.
October 4th
Nathan and I in An Poc Fada shortly after arriving in Kilkenny, Ireland.
Cartoon Saloon Tour
Best known for their 2D animated film Wolfwalkers (2020), Cartoon Saloon is an Irish studio that calls Kilkenny home and is responsible for having hosted Kilkenny Animated for the past five years. The tour of Cartoon Saloon lasted an hour. It took us up the many floors of their main studio and through every step of production, which was indeed eye-opening to the vastness of pre-production and what a professional output should look like.
Character Design
The most notable part of this tour was our time with character designer and animator Sandra Anderson, who showed us the steps of creating a character design, building consistent features, and developing model sheets and animation guides. Everybody thinks they know what a character sheet looks like until they see Sandra’s work. It was truly phenomenal, with pages dedicated to different poses, mouth shapes, feet and hand positions, hair movement, and even notes on the shape of arms and legs during movement.
The most curious part of the design notes I saw during this tour was that Mebh had two separate references for her mouth, with notes dictating whether her teeth should be shown as flat and human or sharp and canine.
This was incredibly impactful to me, as at the time of taking this tour, I had just begun the “animation bible” for Wild Westly. It was useful to identify areas I was missing in my design notes, such as the lack of 3/4 poses in my turnarounds, expression sheets, pose sheets and guides for positioning feet and hands.
A great way to find more examples of Sandra’s work on Wold Walkers is in this article by Animation Obsessive.
Examples of work we would have seen during the studio tour, taken from Sandra Andersen’s twitter
Posing
Like many others, I was quick to raise my hand when asked if we knew what posing was. Like many others, I was wrong.
Posing is commonly used in film between the storyboards and animation; it is similar to an animatic but closer in detail and layout to the final product. Posing, also known as character layout, is when the artist finalises a scene's action, emotion, and spacing based on the approved storyboards for that scene. The poses and expressions used within this area of development are often used as keyframes for the final animation as, unlike storyboards, the characters are on model.
See an example of storyboards vs character layout in this video by Cartoon Saloon
Learning about posing has given me confidence in my own projects. When I hire animators for Wild Westly, I intend to do character layout for the entirety of the Pilot to ensure that key moments are kept on the model and that the scaling of characters and where they are positioned against our backgrounds do not change between pre-production and the final product.
Let’s Talk Animation
On Saturday, October 5th, Nathan and I attended Glen Keane’s Masterclass, The Art of Observation with Joanna Quinn and Les Mills, and Let’s Talk Animation with Glen Keane, Joanna Quinn, John Musker, and Imogen Sutton. These were incredible talks in which each artist spoke about their passion, craft, and history and even showcased what they had been working on in recent months. While there is far too much for me to cover here, and my recounting cannot do most of it justice, a few moments were incredibly memorable to me and may be something people need to hear.
Glen Keane Masterclass
Glen Keane has been a character animator since 1977 and officially entered the industry as a layout artist in 1973. He is a traditional animator who gained infamy for his gorgeous pencil animations for iconic Disney films such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Tarzan (1999), and Treasure Planet (2002) to name a few. While there were many artists on the panels at Kilkenny Animated this year, few made such an impact on their audience in such little time as Glen Keane, who inspired us all with his comedic stories, memorable quotes, and gorgeous displays of skill and passion. Glen even went as far as animating a short sequence live within the last five minutes of his panel, showing the speed and skill of a veteran animator.
“Don’t animate what the Character is doing, animate what the character is feeling”
Glen Keane
The quote above stemmed from Glen explaining how he animated one of his most famous scenes, Part of Your World from Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989). Glen had been initially assigned to work on Ursula during early production, but after reading the script, he requested to be transferred to be Ariel’s character animator alongside Mark Henn. The reason he gave for this desire during his masterclass was that “[He] read the script, and she was real. [He] knew her, and she was real”. This unique take on character animation holds so much weight in an era of mass production, remakes, and soulless 2D rigs. I am sure I speak for everyone at the talk when I say that it has forever changed how character animation should be tackled and developed.
Another part of Glen’s talk that stuck with me was how he spoke about finding your place within the industry and the sacrifices and choices one must make to reach it. Glen began this section with a comedic story about his time working alongside Tim Burton, whose name you may recognise from films such as Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Corpse Bride (2005). Glen spoke of Tim Burton’s misery working for Disney, especially during the production of The Fox and the Hound (1981), recounting a specific story of when he went to hang up his coat only to find Burton standing sadly in the closet. Glen’s response was to hang his jacket up on Burton’s head and go straight to work, returning hours later to retrieve his coat for lunch, only to find that neither Burton nor his jacket had moved. While this story was laced with comedy, the message that it carried struck true in the hearts of many audience members.
“It was just killing him to have to animate pretty little animals. He had to leave… You have to find your own path.”
Glen Keane
Glen stressed the importance of taking leaps in the industry to find where you believe you truly belong, suggesting that if you want to specialise in a specific area or genre you have to do everything you can to achieve this.
Lighthouse Studio
Adult Animation has always been the area of the animation industry that called to me the most, so getting the chance to speak with Ruchi Shah, a producer and production manager, and Colm Dowling, a senior rigging artist and prep lead, at Lighthouse Studio was the best event that Kilkenny Animated had to offer me. Lighthouse studio have worked in the production of adult animated media such as The Bob’s Burgers Movie and Rick and Morty, as well as other outstanding shows such as The Cuphead Show.
Lighthouse Studio’s Career in Screen talk gave a thirty-minute overview of the animation pipeline and its roles, followed by the opportunity to ask the duo questions. During this talk, I asked several questions about animation production that I thought would benefit me as an indie director and help me better understand how a larger studio functions as someone who works at a studio of less than ten individuals. In addition to my own questions, there were others attending the talk that asked questions that I had not initially considered but gladly wrote down the answers to.
Read more about Colm Dowling’s gradual development at Lighthouse Studio in this article on the Lighthouse Studio website.
Q. When there are different colours for night, day, evening, are the colours for this chosen in compositing or during the design phase?
A. [Ruchi Shah] The colour choices for different times of the day are all decided in pre-production alongside the storyboards with the use of a colour script. All colour pallets are decided upon pre-production.
Q. What part of production does compositing fall into?
A. [Ruchi Shah] Compositing is the final step of pre-production. Editing, SFX, music, and colour grading and correction are all post-production.
Q. If editing is post-production then what happens if you need to extend a shot? Do you have to go back and draw more frames?
A. [Ruchi Shah] Often we can get away with duplicating the frames we already have to extend the timing of a shot. We only go back to retime shots later in production if it is an absolute must. Usually, the timing set in the animatic is relatively accurate, with only a handful of shots needing retiming in each episode.
Q. In production, where can you get away with cutting corners and where do you actually cut corners?
A. [Colm Dowling] Everywhere. Except for animation, which is sort of the golden child of production. Say you’re handed two hundred aliens to rig for the backgrounds of an episode of Rick and Morty, and you have five people working in the rigging department. That’s 40 aliens per rigger. It’s all about figuring out how to divide your tasks among the production team effectively. Then you start looking at them like, “Do I really need to rig this detail?” and “This doesn’t show up in the storyboards, so I don’t need to worry about it.”
Q. When you got your internship at Lighthouse studio were you confined to one area of production or were you expected to try everything?
A. [Colm Dowling] I had sent in a general portfolio expecting to get placed in animation. Instead, I got placed in builds and rigging, as in my portfolio, I had rigged and animated my own character. Around that time, that made my portfolio stand out and scream, “I know what I’m doing,” as others were using the same two Toon Boom downloadable rigs in their reels.
Q. What would you recommend putting in a portfolio? Some people say to tailor your reel to the studio you’re applying for, and others say to tailor it to the role you want. Which one is more important?
A. [Colm Dowling] Uhhh. Yes. Have multiple reels and portfolios that cater towards different areas of production. I recommend using a combination of your own original work and also existing media to show your ability to work in different styles.
Q. If I want to go into adult animation specifically, what would I need to put in a reel?
A. [Colm Dowling] The parts of the animation that make it “adult,” such as the nudity, the blood, the smoke, are all SFX.
"You should basically be able to get a portfolio done in two weeks. Sit down and aim to animate two explosions and that's a day's work. It should only take that long because that's how long they are going to expect you to take."
Colm Dowling
