I hear a lot of horror stories about children’s TV productions and, each time, it seems so wrong – shouldn’t making kid’s TV be fun? Happy children’s entertainment shouldn’t mask some trial of agony. It’s about smiles. Laughs. Positivity.

And so now we’re in the thick of Cosmo production. Watching the scenes begin to come together is fantastic. It is a joy.

But I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit to the stress. Much of it is down to limited resources. I have a rule about working within my means. For me, a budget only really shows on-screen if a production reaches beyond its means and doesn’t quite pull it off. The cracks appear. Work within your means, on the other hand, and you can make it the absolute best it can be within those means. The only production on which I ever broke this rule was a pretty unenjoyable one.

So what about Cosmo? It’s an ambitious show with a small budget. Am I breaking my rule?

No.

But it requires being more inventive about utilising our means. Increasing our means. It means being hands-on with every single aspect and making sure that every ounce of energy makes it on to the screen (if energy can be measured in ounces, which it probably can’t). That’s how I’ve always liked to make shows and, on a show with as many elements as Cosmo, it makes for one very long to-do list. That list includes directing tasks, design tasks, production tasks, management tasks, even voicing a character. All at once. And that’s only what I’m doing – every member of the team is contributing.

Here’s the truth: it can be hard sometimes.

Okay so not ‘working in a mine’ hard but it’s certainly not all smiles. You see, clichéd as it may be, nothing worthwhile is ever easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it and, let’s face it, not everyone is. We’re doing something worthwhile here in the studio. In my (admittedly biased) view, with Cosmo, we’re doing something pretty great. So this isn’t about self-pity for those tough days and sometimes tougher decisions. This is simply an acceptance that production can be very busy and it can be hard.

That’s okay. Not okay just as a little thing we may admit to each other at those industry get-togethers. It’s okay generally. In fact, at times, it may be a very good sign. And accepting this leads me to two thoughts -

A) Problems should never be written into a system or accepted as part of the process. It’s hard enough when a production is going right. If the production horror stories don’t in any way lead to a better show on screen, well, that’s a real horror. What we do is about making a meaningful connection with children and giving them something positive. Anything else is just getting in the way.

B) We can be so fortunate to have fantastic teams working on our shows and we should always be thankful for that, for those people who really contribute. The level of support from everyone on our Cosmo team is amazing (Simon Crane and Adam Oliver pictured above). It inspires me and it keeps me going. Right from early development, people have given above and beyond not because they have been asked to but because they chose to. I am thankful for every single person giving to Cosmo right now and I’m already seeing the results of all our work in the scenes.

This is a true joy.

.

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Sworcery A/V Jam

On a different topic, the makers of the excellent Sword & Sworcery game held an A/V Jam over the weekend, in which people could submit music, artwork and more all themed around Sworcery. I was really glad to be a part of it, submitting a cute little image of the Scythian and Dogfella. Some of the submissions are absolutely stunning so, if you have some time, head over and have a browse – http://sworcery.tumblr.com/

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Tags: animation, Cosmo, production, sworcery

I love that there are adults who love children’s shows and who can find things to enjoy across all animation. That is wonderful. But the Cartoonbrew (and similar) crowd are not who most of us are actually making shows for. Our real audience is far more quiet on the Internet than the noisy adults. So even though most of us know the above to be true it always helps to have a regular reminder, hence the new print-out on the studio wall today. The section underneath has already been filled with photos of some of the children of crew-members and their extended families. Just faces reminding us who our real bosses are.

Children are our audience, our clients. They’re in charge.

And you know what? I couldn’t ask for a better boss.

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Tags: animation, Children, Cosmo

Over the last week, I have been completely buried in Cosmo animatics – the stories with voices but just in storyboard form, rather than fully animated. Cosmo is a greater challenge than my previous shows due to the number of elements that all have to flow together – adventure, characters, three songs per episode, two planet information sections, several interactive sequences and more. Vastly different segments that all must come together as a whole in just thirteen minutes.

For guidance, I find watching with an audience can make all the difference.

Not just asking opinion, or even watching their reaction. There is something simply in being in the presence of an audience that can completely change how we ourselves perceive what we are seeing. We get a new perspective. Even if the children sat with poker faces and never said a word, the act of just watching with an audience can make so many things clear.

Then of course, we have the added bonus that our audience rarely sits with poker faces (generally not a good sign) and we can ask them questions. What did you like? Who is your favourite character? What did you learn about the planet? We can learn so much about what is working and not working about our shows from just asking our audience and listening carefully to the answers. If you have your own kids, you have that access to that feedback all the time but, even if you don’t, an audience isn’t hard to find. So why not seek out that feedback?

Well, for me, I find if I’m resistant at all to even looking for the feedback, it’s a sign that somewhere deep down I know something isn’t right and I just don’t want to hear that. So I have to push through it and look for the feedback anyway.

But having children can also show us the limitations in such feedback. As anyone with a child will know, show the same child the same thing on a different day and you will most likely get completely different feedback. Children are incredibly complex beings and prone to such dramatic changes even in just the space of minutes that, when crafting a television show, it can sometimes be a mistake to react to their whims too quickly. What you get back in feedback at any given moment may actually be about something else entirely. This is true for an adult audience too – what they say they want may well not be what they’ll like if you give it to them.

Focus groups can be of very limited value. If they weren’t, every show ever tested would be a huge hit.

Entertainment is an inexact science. Or, at the very least, the science is so complicated that it is well beyond our total understanding right now. Whether from those in the audience themselves, or from those who claim to know what they’re talking about (like me), it’s all just a best-guess scenario.

So feedback is important. But it’s not a replacement for our own independent thought. It shouldn’t be a crutch, an excuse not to make our own decisions, an out-clause if something goes wrong. They are still our own decisions.

So watch with an audience. Listen not just to them, but to yourself as you gain a new perspective.

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Tags: animation, Children, Cosmo

With COSMO up and running, my job shifts into managing a production. Sourcing people to fill those last few roles, hiring them, scheduling the production and setting up systems to work within that schedule, tying up those last few loose ends (I don’t like loose ends) and running the preproduction as the countdown begins to full-on production. Getting this show produced. During this time, the little indulgences become important. They keep the creative brain cells firing and help achieve a management/creative balance along with the writing and directing.

So today, after a fun Paddy’s Day weekend with the family, here is a little gallery of iPad doodles. Some of you may have seen a few of them on Twitter (find me on Twitter here). Imagine them presented with that Tony Hart music.

A huge amount of the concept work for COSMO was created on an iPod Touch and the iPad and this is one of the iPad pieces, so not really an indulgence here. Keeping the images small naturally tends to lead the design to a cute and chunky look so this method worked really well for the show. This is Cosmo and her Dad on Mars and it established the design for their buggy. I may have shown a bit of this one before but here is the whole thing.

Another COSMO image next. This time, on stormy Jupiter…

Next up is a tiger in the zoo. This particular tiger is a character who has been with me for quite some time. It’s like he keeps coming back to me, demanding his own story. I haven’t quite found it yet.

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. This next image illustrates the potential dangers of the transporter. I love pixel art. Adore it. There is something beautifully pure about creating an image square by square. I’d really like to explore the form further and see where it takes me. This one is a rather simple one but, once the pixels were in place, I added some textures and amended the colours a little. This was all done on the iPad using about four apps from start to finish.

I do love my Star Trek!

My favourite movie monster now. Behold the terror…

Another pixelart image now and another Mars picture, albeit not COSMO related. Here are a couple of space explorers making the decision to do the only thing they can. The more I have been working on COSMO, the more I see just how much interest there is in space from little girls. In a world bombarded with princesses, little girl astronauts seem like a far better role model to me. So here they are…

And here they are again on Venus. Venus is a fascinating planet. It’s incredibly hostile and that actually made it quite difficult to write about when developing COSMO. Very few child-friendly stories involve acid rain. Nevertheless, I managed it and we now have two stories about the searing toxic yellow world. And yes, the acid rain is featured. I’m looking forward to seeing what we learn from the Venus Express.

Last up for my little gallery is a drawing of my family. Me, Daisy, Alice and my lovely wife Meabh.

So there it is. My little gallery. If anyone is curious, most of them were made in the Brushes app and the pixels were done in an app called Tiny Pixels. Hope everyone has a great and very productive week ahead. Go create something amazing!

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Tags: animation, art, Cosmo, indulgences

An old story from back in 2009 here. I didn’t have this site up then so here it is, a few years late…

As Chairman of the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland’s Animation Alliance, I had to address the Guild at the 2009 AGM. Just an update on what our group of directors was doing and how things were in our end of the entertainment world. I mentioned at the time that, after a meeting with the Irish Film Board’s then Chief Executive, I came away concerned by what I felt was a dismissal of television for young children.

At which point, someone chimed in that it possibly had something to do with children’s television just existing to sell plastic and that the IFB shouldn’t be supporting it.

How does one react to that?

Well, if I’m anything to go by, one initially gets flustered and then explains that television for young children is the most important television of all and cannot be dismissed. Children are learning, they do watch television and the television we make for them can affect their whole world view. And more eyes are seeing our shows each week across the world than probably any other content from Ireland.

As for selling plastic?

What likely rubbed me up the wrong way most about this accusation is that, for portions of the global industry, it is true. It often has to be true because the economics of making a children’s show rarely work on their own.

All the more reason why public funding bodies must get involved in supporting GOOD children’s television. Television that exists to provide children with good quality, enriching age-appropriate entertainment. Culturally-relevant, even better. Educational, better still.

The more support that’s there for local content, the less children’s shows are bought in from elsewhere. The less those shows have to rely on licensing and merchandise to justify their production costs. The less anyone needs to think about selling plastic. Children’s shows selling plastic is precisely why local funding bodies can’t dismiss one of the most important areas in programming.

Today, several years after that little AGM incident, we have a new animation team starting on COSMO. It is going to be a busy day and an exciting one. Because we’re all working together on a show that exists for one reason: to give children the absolute best. We are very fortunate that it can exist for that one reason and, as it happens, we have the Irish Film Board to thank for that, especially Emma Scott and Andrew Meehan. The IFB were so supportive of COSMO and put so much faith and funding into the show that it simply would not have happened without them and it is why we get to make a show right here in Ireland, with an Irish creator, writer, director, all the top-line creative processes being done here in Ireland, the animation team being right here and, from a business perspective, all ownership remaining right here. For all the right reasons, it matters to Ireland and yet it’s a show that can give to children all over the world. If Fluffy Gardens is anything to go by, it will travel.

Right now, our little area of children’s TV is the poster child for Irish production in many circles.

The support makes all the difference. It makes a difference to sustainability, to the types of shows we can make and the reasons we make them. It makes a difference to children here and, hopefully, to children everywhere.

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Tags: animation, business, Children, Cosmo, Irish Film Board, licensing