Fields and Woods

Production continues to rev up, the posing is well underway and animation is started.
Layout continues with our new Ad Stuart Shankly helping to pull it all together.
Theres a good feeling amongst the team I think and we certainly have some amazing talent in the studio.

Some of the posing team have been working on the sequences in the fields and woods ... a very nostalgic section of the film for me.
I spent a good chunk of my childhood rambling thru the fields and woods nearby to where I grew up just outside Kilkenny.

I want evoke that strange 1980s mix of ancient rural life and modernity where a quiet field of cows might be overlooked by imposing  pylons that had a strange electric hum.

Wildlife of course was never far away but us being noisy and boisterous kids we usually unintentionally scared away any wild animals we came across. However I do have some memories of the magic of seeing a fox, frozen still , looking at us in the middle of a field at sunset or of rabbits popping out of their warren in the edges of the disused quarry behind our house.

We are trying to incorporate some wildlife into the compositions in this sequence,which is partly inspired by the riverboat sequence in "Night of the Hunter" . We have a few scenes with wild animals watching the kids from a safe distance or just going about their business in the foreground while the children pass by unbeknownst to them.

Here are some lovely colour studies by Pedro Vergani , a very talented intern from Gobelins who spent some time with us last year while we we were boarding this sequence.